Back to Business

Finding Your Confidence, Embracing Your Skills, and Landing Your Dream Job After a Career Pause

Nancy McSharry Jensen, Sarah Duenwald

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400221509
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Back to Business makes returning to the workforce accessible for anyone who believes that finding a decent job after taking a career break is impossible.

When on the hunt for a job, make sure your LinkedIn profile is just as polished and updated as your resume. If you aren't getting responses from recruiters, chances are your profile is missing pertinent keywords that bots aren't selecting. In addition, dress codes have changed too, so you'll need to know new technologies such as Slack and Google+ Hangouts. If you have no idea what any of this means, YOU'RE NOT ALONE.

You're one of the forty-five percent of women who, after taking a career break, quickly discovered that the job search has changed rapidly in the last decade. With new modes of communication, rules of discoverability and expectations, this book lays out a clear path for anyone ready to re-enter the workforce.

Getting started is much easier when you know what the first step should be. In Back to Business, career coaching and re-entry experts Nancy McSharry Jensen and Sarah Duenwald, have put together a guide for women returning to the workplace.

Practical and easy to understand, Back to Business teaches you how to:

• Identify and talk about what you want.
• Understand your personal brand and how your skills translate to your new career.
• Become professionally relevant and gain confidence in returning to the workforce.
• Look for job opportunities while being productive and intentional with your time.

Nancy and Sarah understand through first-hand experience the anxiety of returning to work. They have helped hundreds of women facing the job search process to overcome the anxiety of what is often overwhelming life change.

PART ONE

Strategy: Paths Back to Business

Christopher Booker, author of The Seven Basic Plots, outlines the types of stories that are told repeatedly in literature—including Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth.

Similarly, we have four basic paths back to business. And when it’s time to develop a job-search strategy, we’ve found the most successful people, whether they are shifting roles, careers, industries, or returning to the workplace, pursue one of these four approaches, regardless of their background or outcome. We call them the Boomerang, the Lily Pad, The Try and Buy, and Pro Bono to Paid.

Each line of attack has pros and cons, and we’ll go into more detail in each section. All share the common attribute of being deliberate, with a precise plan and approach, and repeatedly result in successful career moves, regardless of the various home and work factors candidates face as they look to shift or return. Looking at your return through this lens can be a guide to the best path that suits you and your specific situation.

That said, we are human beings, and human factors also come into play as you plan your job search strategy. Sometimes unexpected obstacles present themselves. Let’s talk about a few as illustrations of what happened as these women moved forward, obstacles they faced, what approach they employed, and how successful searchers overcame their barriers and moved forward.

CHAPTER ONE

Boomerang: Alice

Gotta Get Back—Fast

Alice’s world turned upside down the day her husband, Seth, first suffered a failed pancreas five years ago. As a stay-at-home mom of two preschool-age children, Alice had been away from work for seven years, keeping the home fires burning and working as a volunteer in her local community while Seth played the traditional breadwinner role, running his family-owned seafood-delivery business and working as a supplier to the region’s restaurant and food service industry.

Suddenly, Seth’s health failed quickly and precipitously. After several days in the hospital, doctors discovered his pancreas had stopped working despite an otherwise healthy lifestyle. At the same time, an infection resulted in near death. Alice supervised his health management in the hospital, working with the care team as they diagnosed and treated his mysterious decline. Alice was also the main caregiver for their infant son and toddler daughter.

Their family financial resources drained, Alice needed to become the household’s full-time breadwinner, and fast. While she didn’t discuss it publicly, she herself grappled with profound hearing loss that required her to wear hearing aids, which, while discreet, posed another potential barrier.

Her scholarship application for our workshops lays out her family’s life-changing situation in heartbreaking detail:

I am a thirty-five-year-old mother of two young kids, with a chronically ill husband and a completely altered life path. My husband has been sick for just over three years with an idiopathic, debilitating illness, in which a life-threatening infection and 75 percent loss of a major organ has left him with chronic daily pain, nausea, and fatigue. He tried desperately to get better, but had to permanently leave his eighteen-year career just over a year ago. This past year, we have been locked in a battle to secure disability and have faced a massive amount of change and uncertainty for the future, piled on top of the trauma and devastation of this illness, which has affected our entire family beyond measure.

As my current role as stay-at-home mom and sole caretaker to all is no longer a viable option for us, I will be seeking to reenter the workforce this fall. I joke that “I need to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life,” in this new role of the family breadwinner, but it’s actually true. I truly am seeking to find the right company and the right career path for the next thirty-plus years and am at a complete loss of where to start.

Due to my husband’s condition and our young children, we were forced to drastically simplify our lives in order to keep our fragile ecosystem intact, especially while my husband was trying to work. We haven’t been able to see friends, rarely socialize except to see our parents, and my outings were limited to preschool drop-offs, playground visits, and grocery runs.

While I, like many moms, own the roles of the Family Caregiver, Executive Chef, Head of Gardening and Landscaping, Housekeeping and Maintenance, Recreation and Adventure, Singer of Nursery Rhymes, and Referee (and, to be honest, Instigator) of Wrestling and Roughhousing, I have lost much of my confidence in expressing the skills I could offer to a company and worry that our isolated life has led to me becoming somewhat socially awkward and definitely behind on technology and workplace advancements!

I obtained a master of science in social work with a policy focus in 2006, which led me to work primarily in the nonprofit and foundation world until the birth of our eldest son in 2013. Now, as the sole provider for our family, I’d like to be open, forging a new career path if need be, and am excited about the many incredible industries and companies in our most beautiful, ever-growing city.

Despite all the relative doom and gloom of the past few years, we are incredibly lucky that our kids are happy and healthy—they are the light of our lives—and for the stabilization of my husband’s health and the care of our extended families and friends. I am actually very excited for this new chapter to begin, to find meaningful work and will take such pride in taking care of my family in this new way, but I just need a little help getting started to navigate the vast landscape of companies and positions, and a big update on technology, productivity skills, and more.

Her prior professional background includes stints as an executive assistant at a regional hotel and event center hospitality group and a nonprofit foundation, led by a charismatic local public figure. We offered Alice a scholarship based on these life factors. “We live paycheck to paycheck from disability, no savings each month whatsoever. Because we had to fight the disability battle, we wiped out our savings,” she explained.

Alice determined she would return to that type of role, as it seemed like the most direct path back to the workplace. She approached her search in an organized, efficient, and systematic manner. She looked for roles that matched her executive assistant experience, reaching out to her community for contacts in-house that would allow her to circumvent the human-resources-sanctioned hiring processes. She rigorously researched companies and roles, so that she was knowledgeable and conversant with everyone from front-line screening recruiters to final interviewers. She got several calls to come in for an in-person interview.

And despite that encouraging response, “It was a difficult, disheartening, and occasionally demeaning process.” She interviewed with several local employers who publicly expressed commitment to hiring women and providing flexible work hours. However, her in-person experiences ran counter to these public-relations claims.

One hiring manager explicitly dismissed her in the midst of an interview, saying: “We have another candidate who doesn’t have as much experience as you, but they have been working consistently and you’ve been away. I’m only talking to you because HR said I had to.”

Another got her to the final interview stage, then opted for a candidate with more recent executive assistant and project management experience.

“These were frustrating experiences overall, especially because the interviews seemed to go so well. I had really put a lot of thought into all the many pluses of the companies and positions, so it was a bit of a blow, but a good experience in steeling myself for rejection,” she said.

Then, after a chance conversation with a neighbor at a holiday party, Alice got a line on an executive assistant role at a fast-growing ride-share company. As before, she rigorously researched and prepared for the phone screen and subsequent in-person interviews.

“I’m in agony!” she reported at the time. “I checked in on Friday morning, and the recruiter let me know that she was meeting with the team later that day, but all the feedback had been ‘very positive’ and they’d have an official update for me by Tuesday. But, crickets. . . . Ugh. It’s the position I really want (hybrid executive assistant and office operations/building out the local team). Every hour that goes by makes me a little less hopeful. Let’s just say that I’m not holding my breath.”

The next day, the company came with an offer for that role, which Alice joyfully accepted after negotiating some boundaries around her on-site hours and a formal review for a bump in pay and title after six months on the job.

Alice was beyond thrilled and relieved as well. “My family’s livelihood absolutely depended on me getting this kind of job,” she recalls. “And the process—it was incredibly discouraging, and it was compounded by the fact that I really had to get back to work. We depleted our savings caring for Seth’s health demands. Feedback like the kind I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Strategy: Paths Back to Business
• Part Two: Marketing Toolkit
• Part Three: The Power of Relationships
• Part Four: Resources
• Appendices
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Authors