This is totally hypothetical based on the recent Ryanair debacle. In no way have I screwed up at work (today, at least), and I don't work for Ryanair.
So I'm the HR manager who decided to switch our company's annual leave year from March-April to January-December. I'm sure I had a good reason to do this, and it should have somehow benefited the company, but I didn't do a proper CBA and now we're having to cancel flights all over the place because all our pilots now have a load of annual leave to take before the end of the year and I've been sacked for it.
Any potential employer receiving my CV in the next 6-12 months will see my previous employer was Ryanair, assume I was somehow connected to the very public problem that has cost the company millions of pounds and made them a laughing stock and will put my application straight in the bin.
How do I recover from this? Every job I've ever started, I've had to at least vaguely account for my time up until that point. A six or ten year gap would look very suspicious unless I lie and say I was a house husband for example. The problem with that is that I might want to list some valuable experience on my CV that I gained at Ryanair. Is it acceptable to list my previous employer as something like "undisclosed" or "prefer not to say"? Without outright lying, would you be able to spin it to sound like you were working under an NDA or for a secret government service or something? What do people in this situation do?