TRANCHED: How to escape the Jobcentre Plus

In this week's budget, the Chancellor devoted an additional 1.7bn to the Jobcentre Plus network. Needless to say, this is unlikely to benefit any unemployed bankers who are reading this.

Thankfully, my time at the Jobcentre Plus was limited to a few weeks. I attended the branch in Fulham, which was actually light and airy and nowhere near the grim image that my imagination had created.

The lady who greeted me was friendly and we started our way through the bureaucratic labyrinth hand in hand. This was where things started going wrong. The modern job centre mentality is heavily biased towards forcing those who have relied on employment benefits as a source of income back into any form of employment. It's all about filtering out the dishonest rather than helping the honest. This is all very well, until you are faced with a recession such as the one we're going through.

The government talks of changing the way the entire Job Seekers' Allowance system works to deal with the level of professionals who have lost their jobs. In reality, any change is likely to come too late.

Until then, here are my own search recommendations drawn from personal experience.

1. Accept the new reality - Some segments of the market are dead and by the time they re-emerge it will be too late for your career, it is time to reassess your skill sets and see where obvious synergies exist.

2. Map out your network - Take some time to map out the contacts you have developed over your years of work and education and rationally map out how they may be able to help.

3. Learn to network successfully - Networking is a far subtler art than most people understand, it is more about asking advice from contacts than simply asking directly for a job - learning these skills will come in very useful going forward.

4. Use your time wisely - Go back over the fundamentals and take time to learn new skills that will help you to stand out when pursuing a new role. I spent months without thinking/reading around the subject and found myself lacking sharpness.

5. Recruitment consultants probably don't have the answer - The dynamics of this recession mean that most recruitment consultants have been swamped with CV's from applicants for whom they have no jobs, weeks spent calling the same old names with little or no reply is a soul destroying way to spend your weeks.

6. Go it alone - Many of those who have been displaced in the last few years have fallen back on their skills and taken the decision to go it alone. The number of small groups of ex-bankers leveraging their skills to try and make a go of it as consultants has ballooned. Many of these firms run on shoe string budgets and many will fail, but given the extremely low opportunity cost of these ventures in the current climate they provide an attractive option.

7. Exercise - It sounds odd given what has come before but I found that it was crucial, hours spent at home during the day hunting for jobs and researching potential next steps created a feeling of isolation and uselessness. One hour's exercise allowed time to gain a bit of perspective and the endorphins help ease the concerns and boost a positive mental attitude.

8. Set a budget and manage your finances - Many of the people I have spoken to found that rather than spend less than when they were working the actually spent more, it is crucial at the outset of redundancy to make sure you are realistic about what money you have and how long you can live on it. If resources are tight at the outset then holding out at home for the dream job may be an unrealistic scenario.

9. Stay positive - There are times during my period of unemployment where I found myself becoming despondent and at points totally de-motivated. You need to walk away from the process and take stock. This allows a clearer head and will hopefully lead to greater clarity of thought.

10. See this as an opportunity - To many people being made redundant in the last year or so banking had been their career since they left university, the cut and thrust / drive to win had attracted them to the industry. However, banking is not the be all and end all, the days of exorbitant bonuses for the investment banks are over for now, those with drive and intelligence should soul search and see if they can't use their skills to make it big elsewhere.