Successfully returning to work is possible! That’s why we are passionate about helping women return to work after a career break.
It was May 2006, more than 15 years ago, but I can still see myself in the office with my manager and work colleagues, and she was updating everyone that I would be back from maternity leave the following week and leading a particular team and project. I can hear her words, and still remember the nervous feeling, wondering how on earth I would cope. My life for the previous few months had been baby routines, breastfeeding and taking care of my two young boys. As I sat there, I hoped that people couldn’t see on my face the panic I was feeling inside, questioning how I would transition back to work. And if that can happen to someone who was a confident and competent worker after six-month maternity leave, I realise how much harder it is for women who leave the workplace for longer.
Our own experiences echo that of many mums whose careers pause or go off track.
You might think, “I used to have real work focus, but my confidence has dropped”, or “I had big career dreams, but now I fear failing”. You may even be thinking, “Where do I start?”.
Three motivators to return to work
There comes a time when you are ready to get back to work, and this can happen for different reasons. We find there are three main motivators for women, like you, to get back to work, and they often overlap.
- Lifecycle: as kids grow up, women choose to return to work at a time that works for them and their families. This can be when children are in nursery or primary school or even when kids go to university.
- Life happens: not always in ways that we planned and major unplanned life changes – divorce, separation, death or retrenchment, can all provide shocks to the family, affect financial security and mean a woman needs to get back to work, sometimes urgently.
- Personal motivation: can be a key driver, for a woman wanting to find or refresh her purpose in life, to grow in self-esteem and self-worth.
Sometimes when you think you are ready to get back to work, there could be a number of ‘blockers’. Above all else, confidence is often the biggest blocker. Even if you can overcome the confidence issue, a key question is often ‘what can or should I do? Do I go back to what I did before, try something new or start up a business?’. The practical issues of investing in the career search can seem overwhelming – everything from the CV, the fear of the interview process, and the huge amount of time that it takes.
Keep going and have the grit to pick yourself up after what seems like the 100th rejection. It is really challenging to sustain the effort to get back to work which is why a career coach, a good friend and certainly our Back-to-work Course can be important motivators.
Women often ask me, “What is the easiest way to get back to work?"
We find the answer to this depends on the timeframe, the financial pressures, and your confidence. Where time is short, financial pressure is high and/or confidence is low – using your existing skills and experience is a quicker road back. If you have the luxury of time and/or some financial resources, then you can pause to figure out what you really want to do, whether to use your existing skills, think about pivoting to a different career or start up a business. Sometimes it’s about the sequence, doing what you did previously to get you back to the work environment and routines, rebalance work/family life and use that as a stepping stone to what you really want to do next.
So what’s our best advice for women, like you, to get back to work? It’s helpful to complete our Worksheet on Readiness for Getting Back to Work.
Here are my 3 Top Tips for returning to work:
- Tip 1: Get clear on Why you want to work. When people are clear on the ‘why’, their motivation levels rise, which is important for sustaining your career search. There are always multiple answers to this question, and taking the time to answer these is a really good investment.
- Tip 2: Figure out What you want to do. Without a doubt, this is the hardest step. It’s tough figuring out what is your life purpose, career ambition and exactly what success means for you in your working life, and what type of work balances your personal, professional and family priorities. But without a clear ambition, it’s hard to focus a job search and develop an action plan, and you may find you drift or jump into different courses or applications but they don’t add up to a coherent career plan.
- Tip 3: Reframing. Helping women to value themselves and their skills – focusing on what they have, not what they don’t have. I spend a lot of time talking to women, building their confidence, and looking at transferable skills. Often women have done amazing things whether paid, or unpaid e.g. supporting a family business or voluntary eg at school or for a club, but very little of this experience is reflected on the CV as women often don’t see that it adds any value. Reframing is also a strong mental exercise too, for women first to recognise these negative thoughts (e.g. I have a disjointed CV), and then act on them, changing what they don’t have into an upside or something they do have (eg rewriting the CV to present voluntary work and results achieved while on the career break).
Investing in your job search
Action 1: Treat your job search like a job. Take it seriously, allocating “back to work” time in your diary. Build small regular work habits. I much prefer it when women say they can focus on the job search 1 hour per day and stick to it, than people who have a ‘back to work frenzy’ and do a couple of days of research or CV work, but then don’t work at it again for several weeks. Getting back to work is not easy, and without a serious and regular time investment, it’s hard to make the transition.
Action 2: Figuring out what you want. The hardest part of a career search is working out what you want to do, what motivates you, and what a work purpose/ambition/success looks like for you alongside being a mum. Don’t try and shortcut this, pause the job search, and invest time to figure this out. Once women have deeply thought about what they want, discussed and agreed with their loved ones, the action planning is much more straightforward.
Action 3: Building a very good dossier and getting lots of recruitment practice. Clean up your social media (e.g. LinkedIn, Instagram), work on a modern CV and tweak it for each role to reflect the job description ‘asks’. Don’t hide work gaps, but using Tip 3 above, positively re-frame. Use this period to get comfortable with the discomfort of talking about yourself, and any work gaps so you can be confident when the real interview comes around.
RecruitMyMom in collaboration with Fresh Horizons brings you this confidence-boosting back-to-work course specifically designed to give you the tools needed to reignite your career. If you want to take the next step, watch our interview here on how to get back to work after a career break successfully. I hope this will inspire you on your “back to work” journey.
Written by RecruitMyMom and Joanne Abbot. Founder and CEO of Horizons Careers.
