<prompt> Human: So I work in the oil industry which isnt doing so well right now. Im seeing people all around me getting laid off left and right. Companies all over town are quickly shutting down and closing their doors. Thankfully for right now I still have my job since its in a niche department that is absolutely critical to operations and its with one of the largest oil companies in the world. Im hoping this means theyll have enough cash reserves work load to push through this. Either way, in the event Im laid off fired, what should I do? Ive never lost a job before. I have no idea what to do or expect and its quite terrifying. I have about 4-5 months worth of an emergency fund but thats it.  <response>: If you feel any shame, get over it. You are in survival mode, so do what you need to do to survive.If you were let go before COB on Friday, file for unemployment on that same day. Get it done and over with.Now take one, and exactly one, mental health day. On this day, you will relax, enjoy the company of your family, and give your brain one day to rest before you start searching in earnest. I want to be clear: the term weekend no longer means anything, and this one mental health day may be Saturday, in which case you start the next steps on Sunday.On the next day, get out of bed at your usual workday time. Perform whatever morning ritual you usually perform, including getting showered and dressed. This is to keep you grounded.Now you go to your new job, which is finding a new job. The cycle goes something like this: Trawl the various sources of job listings for jobs that you can do. When you find one, put it on a list. Your list can be on paper, in a spreadsheet, whatever, it doesnt matter, as long as you can reference it. Sort the list in order of interest. Starting with the most interesting, apply for the jobs.Keep doing that until you find one, interrupted only for interviews.Additional tips and advice: Whether or not to deal with recruiters is up to you. Make sure that whoever you intervew with is actually empowered to offer you an actual job, though, and isnt engaging in human speculation. Create a specific version of your resume per job. I put a serial number on each resume and whenever I got a callback, I would ask them to tell me the number so that I could look up the job offer and know what they are calling about. Make sure that your resume includes key words that are in the job description. Most resumes are vetted by computers these days, so you want to make sure that the machine can see a likeness between what is being asked for and what is being offered. Keep a schedule of your interviews in one place. When I was laid off, I actually used the backs of the business cards from where I was just laid off, writing on each the name of the company, location, datetime, and contact number. I would then tape this to the fridge on a grid. The grid had one column per weekday, a row for morning and a row for afternoon. i would schedule a maximum of two interviews daily, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. The grid gave me the ability to see, at a glance, if I was open for a proposed interview time. 