The trick is to learn some things that don't require a lot of company support. "Gold standard" skills, if you like. I sell books and classes, for instance.
Those still get harder in a downturn, but you need less company agreement that your skills are good. Instead, sell directly to people who mostly don't care about your formal credentials.
It's not perfect. But even a little goes a long way.
Learn skills that are in demand in any org. I can do Sysadmin/Network Admin/IT Manager/Devops for an enterprise, a SMB, a startup, or even consulting part-time if you don't need a full-time person.
You don't need AWS? Cool, I can manage Hyper-V, Openstack, or VMware. You use .NET instead of Python? I can do that. You need me to be customer facing? Easy as pie.
I am not an IT professional. I've a business professional that uses IT to solve problems.
EDIT: /u/todayiamme, saw your reply you wanted to get in touch. I'd love to!
While I'm young (24), I'm putting my effort into cultivating that sort of attitude. Learning is something I love in general, and one great thing about our industry is how there is that you can learn and apply, and how applicable skills from things that aren't directly related actually are. Basically, what you've done is what I want to do, so thanks for the inspiration :)
bad news for you all: in 2014 I noticed, for the first time in 25 years, a slight shift toward Common Sense Hiring: companies are, still bashfully, starting to hire Computer science engineers on IT positions, just like in 60s and 70s. Mind you, this is just a signal for the trend reversion. Expect, in the next five years, full blown shift toward Common Sense Hiring - ONLY Software Engineers on Software IT positions, and ONLY Computer/Electrical Engineers on Hardware IT positions. No exceptions whatsoever.
For the first time in 25 years I, the man who was fired numerous times by people without school, "fired" a company. I gave the pink slip to a company which paid me well for two years (140,000 net) because they abused me. Why is this happening? My research shows that many high posts are shaking. For the first time in 25 years management is fearful. And when they are fearful they know how to hire, rest assured (but they still like to abuse quality workers, the WORKHORSE, along the way - the sadism is an illness). Right now, what they are doing, is the following: they take a WORKHORSE and abuse him until he dies with a view to hiring another WORKHORSE when the first one dies. And so on.
Those still get harder in a downturn, but you need less company agreement that your skills are good. Instead, sell directly to people who mostly don't care about your formal credentials.
It's not perfect. But even a little goes a long way.