[blakdawg]

What if you didn’t wait until you’re unemployed to start thinking about the next opportunity?

What about contributing to a community, with open source code or a tutorial or a conference presentation?

[djellybeans]

Regarding your last statement- while doing these things help, the lack of doing these things isn't necessarily the cause of the problem.

I know that plenty of programmers have never contributed to open source, nor written a single line of code outside of work, and they still have no problem finding or maintaining jobs.