Looking beyond the headlines: there are job opportunities for financial executives who know where to look and are able to focus their skills on how they can help new employers with their problems.

• Author: Raab, Marian
• Position: CAREERS

When giving career guidance to senior-level executives, Mark Anderson, has some surprising advice: "Don't look at the headlines!"

Anderson, president of ExecuNet Inc., a Norwalk, Conn.-based business and career network for senior-level executives, stresses that just because newspapers are full of updates of massive layoffs across various industries, there are still opportunities for financial executives who are agile and able to focus their skills on how they can help new employers with their problems.

"Read beyond the news headlines for opportunities," says Anderson. "You only need one job, so don't be swayed by reports that focus on the total job market when identifying your next opportunity."

Indeed, senior financial executives are in a slightly better position than other types of top executives right now, say recruiters and industry experts, because the Finance function has become increasingly important in the current economic meltdown.

To wit: the new chief executive officers of General Motors Corp., American International Group Inc., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were all chief financial officers before moving into their current positions.

"The most important thing we need to take from this is that Finance has become a much more important function going forward because of the issues that have been created by this recession," says Allen Geller, managing director of Raines International, an executive search firm in New York.

Many CEOs have lost touch with reality, according to Geller. Those executives in touch with reality tend to be the numbers experts. "Those people are going to have much more responsibility in the scheme of things because the government is spending so much money to help so many businesses stay afloat."

Reuters reported earlier this year that the expected clean-up of the U.S. financial-services industry and the federal economic stimulus package has some staffing firms preparing to find jobs for "everyone from blue-collar workers to highly trained compliance officers."

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"Cleaning up the bad loans and re-regulating the financial sector is going to be huge," says Brendan Courtney, vice president of Mergis Group, a unit of staffing firm Spherion Corp of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. "None of this is going to get done without armies of people."

Laurence Stybel, president of Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire, an executive career-management firm in Boston agrees.

"The federal government is going to go on a hiring spree,"...