Goodbye can be hard to do

Even battle-hardened bankers like Sandy Weill show a degree of vulnerability when it comes to stepping aside.

Weill, chief executive and architect of the Citigroup financial services empire, needed the services of a psychiatrist to help adjust to a new life of semi-retirement, according to a review of his recent biography in the Financial Times.

Philip Beddows, a partner at mentoring organisation IDDAS, says Weill's experience is nothing unusual. "You have people who are working all hours god gives them in the most dynamic marketplace in the world and when you detach them from that it can be like hitting a brick wall."

Redundancies at all time low

In the current booming market, the good news is that very few people likely to hit any brick walls before they're ready.

Beddows, a former outplacement specialist offering advice to redundant bankers, says investment banking job losses are at their lowest point for a decade. "At the end of the 1990s we had redundancies related to consolidation, now we don't even have those," he laments.

Michael Moran, chief executive of Fairplace Consulting, a rival outplacement consultant whose share price has plummeted in recent years, agrees. He says the City outplacement market is currently worth around 5m, down from 20m five years ago.

Walk into a new role

These days, Moran says it takes people made redundant around 12 weeks to find a new job: "You need to work very hard to remain unemployed in this market."

With such speedy rehabilitation, psychiatric assistance might not be necessary after all.