GUEST COMMENT: Sometimes, it helps to be realistic about your career
Getting a job in an investment bank is like getting a job as an actor. An ageing actor once said to me that in the good old days there were half the applicants and twice the number of jobs. Nowadays, he said, the reverse applies.
If you want to make it in acting, you probably have a window of around six years after you leave drama school. Beyond that, it gets harder and harder. You can keep trying, but you need to be realistic. What's your back up plan? How long are you going to keep chasing the acting dream to the exclusion of anything else?
Investment banking is much the same. You need to be realistic. If you're one of the unfortunate people who joined a bank in 2007 or 2008 and lost your job in 2008 or 2009, you may be struggling to get back in. It will be difficult: you may not have valuable experience and are up against the latest crop of graduates who are 'unsullied' by redundancy.
If you're in this position, it's important not to damn yourself or your abilities. After all, you are not personally to blame for the western economic cycle. The fact that you opted to go into banking after getting good grades is proof of your ability. It's just part of life's rotten charm that you should be afflicted by a monumental economic crisis at the outset of your career.
Equally, if you're in your late 50s and have a career in the City that spans several decades, it's not necessarily the case that you will work in banking again. Be realistic. Despite age discrimination laws, prejudice against older people does exist and moves in snide and insidious ways.
Investment banking is the kind of profession which attracts a lot of interest from a lot of people. Of those people, only 25% will probably be qualified and eligible for a place and - depending upon the market - 10% or less will get in. The remainder will, unfortunately, have to do something else, and to live with the knowledge that in a better market they would have been luckier.
Other professions suffer the same dynamic. Far more writers, artists, actors and singers fall by the wayside than make it. In the 1980s, I interviewed a Welsh soprano who pointed out the number of wonderful tenors pumping petrol in Wales. Today, their sons probably work in Tesco.
If you're stuck out of the market, and really can't get back in, then you may not want to hear this, but the world lied to you. Things cannot be the same. The financial services industry has met its Waterloo, and there is a serious possibility that it will never recover. Even if it does recover, there are plenty of people circling to ensure it will never resume its previously un-policed form. Their names range from Barack Obama through Vince Cable right up to David Cameron.
Well into the twentieth century we kept on hiring cavalry officers for the army even though by 1900 the cavalry was pretty much redundant. I'd suggest that the continuous flow of would-be bankers is the equivalent to the production of surfeit cavalry officers. Some bankers will always be needed, but in the future they will comprise small specialist units - like the SAS - but never again muster a general corps.
In these circumstances, it's not necessarily sensible to keep banging your head against a brick wall. You need to look at what the next big thing is going to be not the last one. You need to be as realistic as an actor who doubles as a carpenter and sharp as a mounted soldier who studies electronics.
