So, I got a call from my boss yesterday. Looks like my contract is going to get cut short by 8 months.

I was hired by a friend of a friend (my boss) as a contract programmer to work on a project for one of his clients.

That client is having financial difficulties (bad economic sector where the recent drop in oil price has caused a lot of economic downturns.)

My boss runs various projects for his client but he will be retiring soon and the client has just hired its first head of IT.

My boss is trying desperately to re-negotiate my position and role so that I am hired directly by the client. but it's highly likely they'll just can the project instead.

That leaves me in a bad situation because:

1) Every project I've ever worked on has been bespoke software - I don't own any of the code I've worked on, so literally nothing to show of my work.

2) I'm getting on in years and IT is notoriously a young person's field. There are plenty of older people working in IT but...

3) I have very few contacts in the industry. Most contract work comes through networking but I have virtually no network because...

4) I switched careers from IT to teaching ESL, then (about 2 years ago) back to IT.

5) Where I live there is very little work developing software, it's nearly all hardware and the ESL industry here is strong but again they're biased heavily towards younger people.

Any help you can suggest is warmly welcomed. I'm an optimist, so I'm not losing sleep over this, but it's putting me in a much worse situation and I'm open to any guidance.