Layoffs seem to be coming fast and furious these days, with thousands of jobs expected to be lost at companies like Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch. At HP alone, 24,600 layoffs are in the cards.

Obviously, many of these layoffs will leave IT workers without jobs, so how should newly unemployed tech pros go about searching for a new position? To get some advice, I interviewed Janice Weinberg, a former IT pro and career consultant based in Westport, Conn., who recently wrote a book called “Debugging your Information Technology Career: A Compass to New and Rewarding Fields that Value Computer Knowledge.” 

Weinberg said her most important piece of advice is to conduct an active job hunting campaign. While this may seem obvious on the surface, Weinberg says many job hunters are content to simply answer job ads and wait by their phone or computer for a response that might never come.

“The competition is going to be so keen that I don’t believe someone should use that method to any significant extent, because it’s not likely to produce results,” she says. “We’re essentially in a recession, even if the official gross domestic product numbers don’t indicate it. In a recession there are going to be fewer jobs.”

First, make sure to do some serious networking – reach out to former colleagues, anyone you know and update them on your availability and any skills you have acquired since last talking to them. When answering a job ad, make the initial contact by telephone, and don’t just call the main number.

“The active job hunter will initiate contact by telephone with the executive that he or she will have determined in advance, through some research, is likely to be the decision-maker for the job that person is seeking,” Weinberg says.

IT pros have one advantage over workers in just about any other industry – they’re needed everywhere. “IT people can really work in any industry,” Weinberg notes. So you should consider targeting industries that are at least somewhat resistant to economic turmoil, such as healthcare, government and education.

Healthcare in particular is an especially attractive industry for IT pros today, because “there has been a very strong emphasis on computerization” with electronic health records and computerized physician ordering systems, Weinberg notes.

Jon Brodkin is senior writer at Network World.