I’m old enough to have been through bad times before, and the recurrent pattern is that the real losers are the people who fail to work their way back. Everyone has career breaks, this is yours. Wipeouts leave spaces for determined people to move forward faster. Even if this sounds like crap to you, it is necessary for you to think this way. I’m habitually contemptuous of psychobabble but it really is the case that going passive is the worst thing you can do.

Look hard at what you’ve got to sell.

As a headhunter I have learned that a significant percentage of your market value is the brands that have endorsed you. Lehman employees that I’ve met are distinctly above average, and I know that is a common opinion. To get hired by Lehman in the first place, you must have shown yourself to be smart and able to deliver. As it happens, LB turned me down for a job some years ago, so I know first-hand that the bar is set high….

I’ve written When it hits the fan, job hunting in a difficult market, which is freely available to those who need it. The short version is that you need to work on your network and really put the effort into a total rebuild of your CV. Write down everything you can do because the odds are that you will have to move diagonally, and yes, that may have to be diagonally backwards. I do mean everything you can do – to do this properly needs at least three passes, and there is no reason why you can’t meet up with people in the same situation to share ideas on this.

I don’t know how long or deep this downturn will be, I do know it will end. The most common failing of people coming back after a break is that they don’t seem to have done anything with the time, which implies they’re not much of a self starter. To an extent, it doesn’t really matter what you did, as long as it was purposeful and can be spun as not just watching daytime TV waiting for the phone to ring.

It’s hard to call which of your skills will get you a new job, but you need to embrace this downtime for maintenance and upgrade. Hit the books, maybe take a course, and talk to other refugees about the business, keep that part of your brain going. It never hurts to help others where you can, I’ve got past some of my more stupid career decisions by people remembering that I once helped them; others forget, but the mean return is still good.

Objectively, you still have value. Hold that thought in the days to come.

Dominic Connor is a director of P&D Recruitment.