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New prospects for fired bankers
By CNN's Mallika Kapur
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Anthony Seravalo is good at table football, and he has become even better at it since taking a new job. An investment banker who was made redundant from Salomon Smith Barney in January, Seravalo is now with a film distribution company -- where a quick game of table football is not uncommon. "There's an old investment banking saying that working in investment banking, you can only have two of four burners going at the same time -- the burners being family, friends, health and general well-being," Seravalo says. While he's no longer in banking, his new job -- with its more relaxed environment -- has advantages: "You can at least have more than two (burners) on." Seravalo is among about 60,000 investment bankers around the world who have lost their jobs in the past year. In Britain alone, 36,000 workers in the banking, financial and insurance sectors have been made redundant in 2002. For Darrin Moy, who works at a headhunting firm that recruits exclusively for jobs in the City of London, the layoffs have both helped and hurt. "Two years ago, if you called a candidate, the likelihood was they had had five other calls from headhunters the same day or same week, which meant you had to work a lot harder to make them listen to what you had to say. So that's a positive change for us," he says. "The negative change is that you do see very good people who are out of work and you think, deep inside yourself, it's going to be hard to find them something in the short term." While many are hoping to return to the job market, being laid off has been a blessing in disguise for several others. Raoul Schuddeboom lost his job at Lehman Brothers only a few weeks ago, but after working in mergers and acquisitions for seven years, he says he is in no rush to jump back into banking. "What I really want to do is step back from it all now and explore new steps. So I am talking to a lot of friends and former colleagues to explore different opportunities. "The only difficulty really is, because so many exits have been accelerated, that a lot of natural next steps for bankers have been inundated with CVs in the last year," Schuddeboom says. "So the transition in the current market will take much longer than it did two or three years ago." Meanwhile, he says he is happy to focus on the brighter side of his redundancy -- more time with his wife and one-year-old son, Willem.
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