Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor... as children we counted out our future careers in cherry stones or daisy petals. On a winter's day you might knock them down in snowballs like the mischievous gang I saw on the common yesterday pelting commuters as they struggled towards the Tube station.

What were the occupations of the harried workers trudging through the snow? Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief? Or was it banker, lawyer, hedge fund manager? A lump of wet snow to add to the indignity of professionals dragged lower in the social pecking order. Worse still, they have the nagging worry on the road to work that redundancy, a phenomenon that a year ago seemed to have been banished from the world of finance, is shredding their job prospects, not just among bankers but in the legal profession too.

When did you last hear of an unemployed solicitor? Every uncle proffering unwanted careers advice to a teenage nephew or niece would suggest the law. It was the safe career for a bright child with good non-science A levels but lacking murderous financial ambition. Along with medicine, it was the favoured option for a swotty daughter. But the secure home of jurisprudence for middle-class arts graduates has vanished, almost overnight.

Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Linklaters, a roll call of top corporate law firms in the City of London and every one a headline about a job cull. Clifford Chance is laying off up to 80 London lawyers while Linklaters is losing 120 associates. These are qualified lawyers ranking below partner level but, most shocking of all, some 55 Linklaters partners are also reported to be facing the chop.

These are the Lipizzaner stallions of the legal profession and, like the famous Viennese horses, they are good for show, acrobatics and legal derring-do for those able to afford their colossal fees. The top partners at these firms have been known to charge £900 per hour and the profit per partner at Linklaters exceeds £1 million per year. But their clients have had enough and are rebelling against corporate lawyer greed, just as the world at large rails against banker greed. This is a world in which the greenest of articled clerks could earn £30,000 per year.

There is talk of bogof deals - buy a partner, get the junior free. Many years ago, when I worked in the City, posh lawyers came in threes - the partner who said something clever and then hurried to another meeting, the associate who stayed and did the work and a spotty youth who did photocopying and ate the biscuits. In the new world, one out of three is surplus.

Outside a small group known by lawyers as the “magic circle” firms, there are the workhorses, a world of ordinary commercial and real estate law that is feeling extreme pain as Britain's economic engine splutters and property transactions dry up.

If the law is not the middle-class meal ticket it once was, where does today's undergraduate look for a career? The names of the most popular employers have hardly changed for decades. According to Universum, an employer branding consultancy, the favoured jobs among British undergraduates studying business topics last year were at the big four accountancy firms and the big American investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs. The only new name among the Top Ten was Google. For humanities students, the roll call was also depressingly familiar: the BBC in top place, followed by the Civil Service, the Ministry of Defence, Teach First, the NHS and Reuters. And again, Google.

Only the engineering students showed any faint interest in manufacturing, with Shell, Rolls-Royce and GlaxoSmithKline appearing in the Top Ten. But who would have thought that the Environment Agency, the MoD and the BBC were among the top four favoured destinations for budding British engineers? Still, the most admired job was to be found at Google.

It says something about the power of branding but it says more about the persistence of unhelpful social attitudes about work - attitudes that have left Britain stuck at the bottom of a dry well, doing deals and telling tales. Consider the preferred careers: the banks are wounded, nursing stupendous losses run up by the graduates of a decade ago. The money is gone; there is no room for someone wet behind the ears. Media employers have been crucified by a world of free information on the internet. Who is left to give a graduate a cool job?

The onus is on the public sector and the Government has been doing a sterling job expanding employment. According to the Office for National Statistics, the State has been hiring while the private sector is firing. Up to two thirds of the jobs created over the past decade have been in the public sector and that won't include the newly nationalised bank tellers at Northern Rock. The unanswered question is how a less profitable Britain can afford more people on a public payroll totalling 5.8 million even as fewer are left in the private sector to generate the wealth to pay for it.

The political bill for a swollen public sector will grow as the financial bill becomes unmanageable. Most of the existing civil servants will retire at 60, their pension liabilities total £120 billion and the scheme is unfunded. Will a future government dare to tamper with the most coveted pension scheme in the country? It would be a brave man who would say never.

There are still employers who are hiring, selectively. Within the oil industry, they are crying out for frontline staff, geophysicists and petroleum engineers. In the United States, last year some graduates in these disciplines were being offered better deals than at the Wall Street banks.

What is shocking is that we should find it strange that engineers earn more than bankers, that an expert in fluid dynamics working on an oil project in West Africa should command more respect than a person sitting in front of a screen in Canary Wharf. We should not - and it is that blinkered vision that has caused us all our troubles.

Carl Mortished is world business editor

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