Lost your job? You have two years to find a new role, says William Cohan, former banker turned award-winning author.

If you’re one of the thousands of bankers who’ve been laid off in the midst of the current financial crisis, it may be difficult to imagine a time when you can return to Wall Street or the City at anything like your former level of pay or responsibility.

However, it’s never too early to begin strategising about such a turn of events – the day is (surely?) not too far off when the bust part of this cycle will end and Wall Street will begin gearing up for its next boom.

I offer a few suggestions based on my own experience of being involuntarily removed from Wall Street, in 2004, after a 17-year career. First of all – and this is hard – you must stop bemoaning your fate and realise, for starters, how fortunate you probably are to have made more money than 99.9% of other people who are laid off from jobs in other lines of work. Second, you must ask yourself if working in banking is really what you want to do?

Bankers are forever telling me that they intend to leave Wall Street in a couple of years after “just getting a few more bonuses socked away”. Of course, they never do leave, addicted as they are to compensation far beyond what they could ever hope for in a different profession.

Being laid off takes away the luxury of deciding when to leave. But it can also provide a rare opportunity to reflect. In my case, I decided that 17 years was sufficient and began a new career as a writer.

If you’re determined to return, though, there are several facts to keep in mind. First (and this applies to US bankers), without being part of a Wall Street firm, your Series 7 certification will lapse in two years. The annoying test can always be retaken, but the two-year window provides a useful time parameter for your return. In other words, if you haven’t found something within two years, that fact alone could be telling.

Second, during the last boom, Wall Street created a number of programmes designed to bring long-fallow bankers back to the Street; assuming these programmes are still active, this might be a fruitful path.

Third, and nowadays especially, there are many, many, more promising opportunities to pursue beyond the confines of Wall Street securities firms. There are thousands of private equity firms, hedge funds and money management firms. They are also grappling with the new financial realities, to be sure, but because of their guaranteed revenue from management fees they are far more likely than Wall Street banks to consider new hiring. These jobs remain difficult to obtain but a background on Wall Street is often the perfect prerequisite.

And, truth be told, people kicked off Wall Street for one reason or another started many of these firms, and you may find a sympathetic ear. Which leads to the ultimate risk that the newly laid-off can take – starting your own business. By appointing yourself the boss, you remove from the equation the risk of being at the mercy of a ruthless manager. And that leaves plenty of risks – and all the upside – for you.

William D. Cohan, author of The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. (Doubleday 2007, published in paperback in the UK by Penguin April 2008), was an M&A banker on Wall Street for 17 years.