“Candidates who have overcome adversity and navigated difficult periods might have an advantage over candidates without such experience”

It has become increasingly common to be out of employment for extended periods of time. During the pandemic especially, many people have chosen to exit the workforce for health and safety reasons, because of responsibilities to their dependents, or simply because they were laid off due to cuts. Of course, this is hardly a recent phenomenon. Among women especially, career gaps have always been the norm, often due to the demands of maternity. And yet, a London Business School article in 2014 indicated that 70% of women in their survey ‘would feel anxious about taking a career break’. We’ve all heard anecdotes about the dreaded “gaps in the CV”, but it is difficult to understate their real impact. According to ResumeGo research, CVs with a career gap are 45% less likely to receive an interview than those without. These women are consistently overlooked in favor of ‘safer’ candidates without career gaps and their missing time is often used as a bargaining chip against them.

Walby and Olsen, for instance, found that each extra year of break corresponded to a 1% pay cut.

 

This is unfair.

While there might be genuine barriers to re-entry, career breaks often involve activities like caring or household management. These activities develop skills, experience, and knowledge that are valuable in the workplace as well. In fact, candidates who have overcome adversity and navigated difficult periods might have an advantage over candidates without such experience — even if it does take them longer to adjust to the workplace. Women who have taken career gaps face a multitude of issues when trying to return, from being stereotyped and disregarded to having to adjust to new methods and technologies common in their fields. An effective solution to these issues is a new type of program called a returnship, where women can reintegrate into the workforce through an internship-like program designed for returning workers.

 

Career Gaps: What’s the Problem?

 

 

Of course, career gaps do present challenges. Both returners and employers might struggle at first. It’s worth exploring what these challenges might be.

 

Candidates who have been out of the job market for years might not be up to date with the new technologies and processes used in the field. Coming back to work to a largely cloud-based environment, for instance, might be difficult to adjust to: simple tasks like uploading work to a shared folder could prove challenging. Adjusting to this is not easy — it may involve a steep learning curve in a fast-paced environment where mistakes are costly. Even if the workplace itself hasn’t changed, candidates might struggle because they’re out of practice. After an extended break from work, skills atrophy and knowledge becomes harder to access. A great example of this is language attrition, in which people forget even their native languages after periods of predominantly using other languages. Especially in the tech world, regular practice is imperative to maintain proficiency; becoming rusty with programming languages after years of disuse might disadvantage candidates in high-stress situations like interviews.

Women Returners interviewed Charlotte, a senior engineer who took two and a half years off work to raise her second child. She believed that application processes are implicitly tailored to those with recent experience. In a particularly gruelling interview, she struggled with a live coding exercise and was disheartened enough to quit the conventional job search entirely. In general, candidates who take time off might become unfamiliar and uncomfortable with aspects of the working environment, such as structured working hours and regular deadlines. They need time to refamiliarize themselves with the specific demands of their office jobs.

Interviews like Charlotte’s also illuminate another area of concern. After so long away from work, the skill degradation and inability to immediately adapt to new working environments have profound psychological impacts as well. Many women struggle with “stereotype threat” or “social identity threat”. Having entered an unfamiliar environment, self-consciousness leads to diminished self-confidence. Employees fear making small mistakes, worrying that they will be stereotyped and that they will confirm the judgment that their break makes them unsuited for the workplace.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. Problems extend beyond disadvantages resulting from factors like skill loss and low self-confidence. Many employers hold an implicit bias against career gaps. They often associate career gaps with negative attributes like laziness, being uncommitted, or being overly family-oriented. Consequently, candidates might be screened off before an interview simply because they indicate a career gap in their CV. Alternatively, they might be unfairly rejected in favor of less qualified candidates without career gaps. Nina, a manager in the tech world, was told at a job interview after a twenty-year break that she wouldn’t even be considered because her break was too long. It is a common misconception that a break is just wasted time, that women have lost skills and not gained useful experience. Yet, many of the things women spend time on during career breaks bring a lot of value to their work. Thus, companies are missing out on a massive pool of potential employees when they ignore women who have taken career breaks.

 

Potential Benefits to Career Gaps

Women take career gaps for several reasons many of which present excellent opportunities to develop transferable skills that are extremely valuable to employers.

 

 

Historically, childcare has been the leading reason for women’s career gaps. Raising a child is incredibly complex and demanding and hones several crucial skills. There’s much responsibility, with little direct support and guidance. There is no instruction manual. Ultimately, mothers have to make decisions that shape their child’s life. Such experience develops decision making skills, creativity, resilience as well as leadership. In addition, time management and task prioritization skills are constantly tested and improved by dealing with the endless stream of pressing tasks.

Another reason is caring for a sick or elderly family member. This is an exercise in empathy, planning, and communication. It can be an emotionally taxing process, which can build resilience and emotional growth. Also, it often involves negotiating complex environments and making critical choices, such as healthcare decisions for someone else. Strong communication is required in these situations to understand what the patient is going through and needs, and perhaps to have difficult conversations with family members and dependents about the situation.

While on a career break, many women take courses to upskill. With bourgeoning open online courses (MOOCs), it can be both inexpensive and convenient to maintain old skills and develop new ones, all from home. These courses present a less demanding alternative to stay ‘productive’ and demonstrate proficiency to prospective employers, where full time employment is not possible. Rather than relying on their pre-break experience and skills, these women are working hard to learn more and perform at a higher level. Women Returners shared Amma’s story of how she developed skills in her three-year-long break from banking while she looked after her three children. She took online Continuing Professional Development courses to boost her skills and volunteered locally to help her community. Over her break, she developed many soft skills critical in modern business. At the end of her break, she successfully achieved her goals: cared for her children, helped her community, and secured a returnship at the Bank of England.

 

 

Part-time work and volunteering are another way to develop and maintain skills. Women often carry out charity work during a career break, which allows them to do meaningful work that contributes to a good cause without committing unsustainable amounts of time. Imagine Magazine interviewed Shan, a journalist who took a career break for personal health and childcare reasons.  Shan found it difficult to re-enter the workplace once she was ready. So instead, she set up a support network for people who, like her, suffered with thyroid imbalances. Shan presents a good example of how career breaks can provide an opportunity to change direction, or even to simply develop new skills, make an impact, and then return to work. Her charity work allowed her to develop various leadership skills and to demonstrate her ability to get things done, attributes prized by any company.

The skills women develop over a career break are countless. Even running a household—balancing the many household chores and demands—involves using many skills like management, leadership, and communication. Attributes aside, hiring such women is extremely useful for diversity purposes. The homogeneous work environments of many companies stifle their innovation and creativity. By hiring women with non-corporate experience, companies can inject fresh perspectives. Currently, such talent is being underutilized. A PwC report estimates that roughly 2 in 3 women returning to the workforce are employed in positions below their potential. If job- returners were brought back into the workforce and placed in appropriate roles, the report estimates up to $2.25bn could be generated in the UK alone. Thus, there is enormous economic potential that can be realized by giving women opportunities to return to the workforce.

 

Solutions: Returnship

 

 

Given these immense benefits, and the value to both candidates and employers resulting from career breaks, it’s important to consider whether the challenges discussed earlier can be overcome.

 

One increasingly popular way to overcome the challenges and leverage the value from career breaks is Returnships. These are short-term programs that allow professionals to get back to work after a career break. Returnships help ‘returners’ ease in, recover their skills, and understand how the industry has changed since they left. They are similar to internships, running over a short three to six month period in which the returner does a variety of work to gain relevant experience and to find a good fit. As we’ve seen, after career breaks people often return to environments where the work is similar but the methods have changed. Returnships give women time to adjust to the new methods required in their working environment, as well as to decide which roles now suit them best, rather than going straight into a job by default. After all, job responsibilities change over time and returners develop new skills and experiences. Thus Returnships offer the chance for women to build up their experience by working on different projects and find the areas that suit them best.

Returnships benefit companies too. They offer a trial period with an employee to see how well the employee functions within the company, without committing to hiring them if it doesn’t work out. And if it does work out these employees have a better understanding of the whole company and are more likely to manage responsibilities best suited to them. This is a tried and tested model. Companies already do this for interns, hiring students that fit well with the firm after a mutually-beneficial ‘trial’ period. Goldman Sachs’ program, for instance, yielded great returns. Around 50% of the 123 participants in their Returnships to date have taken on full-time positions at the bank. The benefit to the employer is clear. It’s a simple way to evaluate candidates and attract talented prospective workers. Now more than ever, in the face of a labor shortage resulting from Covid-19, it is vital that we appreciate the talented professionals returning from careers breaks, and do not squander that immense potential.

What can you do?

What you do matters. Here are a few things you can do:

Use your time off. During a career gap it’s easy to be overwhelmed by your other responsibilities, but it’s important to stay in touch with your professional life if you intend to return to it at some point. This need not be time-intensive or stressful. While you obviously took a break for a reason, it’s much easier to do some productive activity in the background when you have the time, like an online course or certification, than it is to do full time work.

Make your transferable skills explicit. Whatever you did during your break, it likely developed transferable skills of the sort that we’ve discussed. If you can direct attention towards these, employers will focus on what you gained from your time off rather than what you lost. You can help dispel the idea that you “weren’t working” and instead show that you were simply doing a different type of work, one equally challenging and valuable.

 

Be positive about the break. One of the best ways to overcome the challenges posed by a career break is to control the narrative. If you come across as anxious about the impact your time away has on your prospects, then employers will naturally assume that it’s a bad thing. But if you frame it as a positive experience — one from which you learned  — then employers will be more receptive. Simply giving a reason for your career break has been shown to increase hiring rates by 60%, or 2.5 percentage points, on average.

Apply for returnships. As we’ve seen, returnships can be incredibly valuable. They can provide you with a gentle re-introduction to the workplace aimed at alleviating your anxiety and recapturing your skills. Rather than facing the daunting prospect of being thrown into the deep end, consider returnships designed to support you through the toughest parts of returning to work.

If you’re in the fields of Data and AI visit womenindataethics.org to apply for DataEthics4All’s Returnship program, starting soon!