The wreckage, carnage, and detritus of 2008-2009

When I last blogged on the job market and the shock tremors it's causing you, things were a lot rosier than they seem now. In the past two months, companies and careers have been plummeting to earth like fighter planes in World War II newsreels.

If you've lost your job (especially in Financial Services or in Technology), your situation may appear more hopeless because a number of the companies that you might have targeted for your next position either have been acquired or as is the case with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, they don't exist any more.

We know that the acquired companies will be focused on integrating operations and eliminating redundant positions for the next few months. The wreckage we see is even affecting companies whose obituaries have not appeared in the newspapers. For example, you might be attempting to network with or contact someone at another firm only to find a few weeks later that that person no longer has a job.

Let's be realistic. It will take a while to replace the many jobs that disappeared in the economic mess we're experiencing.

NEVERTHELESS, this IS a time to be sure to be focused, consistent, and persistent in your networking, in your planning, and, most of all, in realizing that the best of opportunities often surface in hard times just like these.

This is a good moment for you to take a step back and ask yourself, "What do I want for the next role in my life"? Do I simply want my old job back, or a job that's very similar in perhaps a different company?

Here's a slightly different angle of approach: all things considered, does the job loss that you just experienced give you the opportunity to examine some of the things you've wanted to do but have not done because you were caught up in the daily pressure of the "urgent" while being forced to give short shrift to what is really "important" in your life and work?

I'd like for us all to think about some "what-ifs" and "maybe's" and the possibility of trying different things that might open a door to alternatives, new interests or types of work, or new paths in our personal and professional life.

For example, do we have to stay in the big city where we worked until recently? How possible is it to get away for a while, even for a few weeks, to experience some other place, find out what's going on someplace different, perhaps in the town we came from? Most of us are accustomed to thinking of "getting away" in terms of a costly vacation trip, with all the frills. What if we just packed up and went away somewhere to "smell" what life is like there, to investigate working and living in a new place?

The carnage of the financial services sector has now spread to other, very different sectors, and reading the newspapers and watching CNN, you get the impression that there's an insidious job plague racing around the country killing jobs and workplaces. This makes for a scary picture, believe me, but watching the same bad news run and re-run on all the networks, cable news outlets, and on the internet is unhealthy.

So get out. Do something. It need not cost a lot of money. Change your venue. Change your habits. Take a walk. Go for a hike. Leave the house in the AM on a nice morning and see how much you can walk and clear your head between 9 AM and 4 PM, let's say. Breathe easy. Observe your home town, your surroundings, the things you normally race past every day on the way to the train or to the expressway to get to the job you no longer have. Live a little. Talk with your neighbors. Strike up a conversation with a stranger in a coffee shop. Take some time to experience daily life in ways that you probably couldn't or didn't think of doing while you were working and watching life pass you by.

Then, and only then, can you begin to figure out where to go from here, what makes sense and is worth achieving, and how to do it.