Back to Business: Finding Your Confidence, Embracing Your Skills, and Landing Your Dream Job After a Career Pause

By Nancy McSharry Jensen and Sarah Duenwald

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Jan 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781400221509

Nancy McSharry Jensen

Nancy Jensen has launched businesses for IDG and Microsoft, served as an instructor at UW, and currently serves as CEO and Co-Founder of The Swing Shift. She’s been featured in Forbes, The Huffington Post, at Seattle’s infamous F-Bomb Breakfast Club and the Female Founders Alliance Champion Awards. The award-winning Swing Shift was a semi-finalist at Social Venture Partners Fast Pitch competition, and a finalist for Seattle Chamber’s Women in Business Leadership awards. Nancy believes that women shouldn’t be penalized for taking care of their families, committed to getting women into the workforce on their own terms, and dedicated to 100 percent pay parity.

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© 2021 Nancy McSharry Jensen and Sarah Duenwald

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC.

Any internet addresses, phone numbers, or company or product information printed in this book are offered as a resource and are not intended in any way to be or to imply an endorsement by HarperCollins Leadership, nor does HarperCollins Leadership vouch for the existence, content, or services of these sites, phone numbers, companies, or products beyond the life of this book.

ISBN 978-1-4002-2150-9 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-2141-7 (HC)

Epub Edition November 2020 9781400221509

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947593

Printed in the United States of America

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Ebook Instructions

In this ebook edition, please use your device’s note-taking function to record your thoughts wherever you see the bracketed instructions [Your Notes]. Use your device’s highlighting function to record your response whenever you are asked to checkmark, circle, underline, or otherwise indicate your answer(s).

This book is dedicated to the 45 percent of women who have taken a career break and the 60 percent who are currently unhappy, unfulfilled, or unappreciated at work and want to make a change.

You are not alone. This book was designed for you to take what you need, using it as leverage and motivation to take control of what’s next for your career.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

PART ONE: Strategy: Paths Back to Business

1. Boomerang: Alice

2. Lily Pad: Aliyah

3. Try and Buy: Emily

4. From Pro Bono to Paid: Jasmine

5. How You Can Do This: Discernment and Self-Assessment

PART TWO: Marketing Toolkit

6. What Is a Personal Brand?

7. Position and Pitch

8. Social Media Platforms

9. Résumés: What’s Good Enough?

PART THREE: The Power of Relationships

10. In-Person and Online Connections

11. Networking with a Purpose

12. Networking Toolkit

PART FOUR: Resources

13. Interview Preparation

14. Negotiations

15. Alternative Hiring Options

16. Timeline and Salary Expectations

17. In This Together

Appendices

Appendix 1 The Self-Assessment

Appendix 2 Mind Map Worksheet

Appendix 3 The Paths Back to Business: Cheat Sheets

Appendix 4 Creating Your Personal Brand: Who Are You?

Appendix 5 Creating Your Personal Brand: Passion and Purpose

Appendix 6 Your Elevator Pitch

Appendix 7 Interview Prep Template

Appendix 8 Salary Negotiation Worksheet

Appendix 9 Performance Review Annual Raise Exercise

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Authors

INTRODUCTION

EVERY YEAR, 45 PERCENT OF American women take career breaks. They leave to care for their children, their parents, and sometimes themselves. When it’s time for them to return to work, they face an unnerving, lonely landscape.

Despite track records of professional achievements and personal triumphs, many women find themselves fearful when it’s time to get back to work.

They feel like frauds, claiming professional expertise for work done what seems like a lifetime ago. Out of the loop, many privately wonder if they can catch up to a world where performance acronyms change like the wind, where yesterday’s performance dashboard is today’s KPI (key performance indicators).

They’re concerned about being judged for taking a career off-road to care for their families, delaying or dashing career growth; or worse, stigmatized as taking the dreaded mommy track, opting out of the workforce.

And, finally, they’re afraid of being ridiculed for trying to get back in.

We know, because we went through it.

Nancy took a five-year break to care for her young children and elderly parents. When she decided to return to work, she was appalled by how dismissive recruiters and hiring managers were, despite the fact that she had built a very successful career at International Data Group and Microsoft Corporation.

Sarah stepped back from a successful sales career after the birth of her second child, but realized quickly that she needed to work and wanted to make an impact, while maintaining flexibility for family needs.

If this sounds familiar, know that you’re not alone.

That brings us back to our first statistic above: 45 percent of American women face this harsh reality every year—that’s seventy-seven million people. Virtually all want to return to paid work, but they experience the same fears and frustrations that we did when it was time to get back to work.

As Nancy says: While I felt bad, I was also angry. I had a pristine professional résumé, with fifteen years of experience building businesses on both coasts. I helped launch multiple products at Microsoft, including the $1 billion-plus SharePoint business. If getting back to work was this hard for me, what was it like for everyone else? I wanted to fix this problem. I started talking with friends and colleagues about this challenge, and had the immense good fortune to meet Sarah Duenwald, who was looking to stay engaged in work while her children were young, building on her very successful career in business development, gaming, and human resources software.

We joined forces to start The Swing Shift and help women like us who want to work and have families, supporting them as they move forward in their career. And what we’ve learned is that the modern job search is a game, populated with ever-changing technology, new and evolving hiring processes, and a raft of unwritten rules about how to search, taking into account what hiring managers are looking for in candidates.

Our programming brings together women from all walks of life and spans the block-and-tackle elements of the job search—résumés and LinkedIn—and pairs them with modern elements, like using connections to reach friendly hiring managers. We bring in expert professionals—working professionals who navigated their own paths back or made impactful career transitions. They generously share their stories, firsthand experiences, and guidance to help women move forward toward their career goals.

The demand for help getting back to work is enormous, and we’ve grown to make sure we can serve the hundreds of women who want to get back into paid work or move into a role that better fits their needs and lifestyle. We’ve spoken with thousands more both in-person and at online events. We’ve learned about their needs and wants and fears.

So, if you’re one of the seventy-seven million women who took a break—and the almost 60 percent who want to shift roles or careers—this book is for you. We wrote it to share what we learned about what works in the modern job search, with the hope that you can take advantage of it to get back to business.

We’ve broken the book down into practical, actionable steps. We outline job search strategies to assist you in determining the best road back. We teach you how to build your job-search marketing toolkit, which includes résumés and LinkedIn, and also covers your pitch, personal brand, and social media’s impact on your search. We walk you through the power of relationships, working to activate connections both in-person and online. We also provide guidance on interview preparation, negotiations, and time-to-market factors that will influence your search.

These steps, taken together, will get you back to work.

While we know you might be apprehensive, we want you to assure you there is hope. We’ve worked with women who have come from incredibly challenging circumstances and have gone forward to build their careers into what they need and want to fit the circumstances of their lives. We’ve shared just a few of their stories as illustrations of how to get back to business.

Whether you’ve been away from paid work, stuck in a career you don’t like, or at a dead-end job, you’ve picked up this book because you’ve come to realize that the job-search process has changed. You need a search strategy, a marketing toolkit, and most important, you need to activate your connections and network.

And there are so many more aspects to looking for a job. Social media is a crucial element. Possessing a professional social profile, as well as augmenting it with a relevant, personal, social presence, is commonly understood to be a must-have.

There are human biases in play, both in terms of your career break and sometimes your age. A 2018 Harvard Business Review study shows that hiring managers would rather hire someone who had been laid off or fired rather than a stay-at-home parent, even one with a track record. And in many industries, you’re considered old by age forty-five.

Human-resources screening technology isn’t friendly to those who have gaps in their work history, because it makes decisions predicated both on how recent your work experience is and how pertinent it is to the job description, making no allowances for transferable skills or alternate career paths. New business trends and workplace technologies are in place that didn’t exist even three years ago. Looking for jobs is time consuming. Time management is essential, especially since most women are pulled in several directions simultaneously.

And then there are the emotional components. Repeatedly, women who stepped back from traditional work tell us of their fears and shame about their decision to do so. Despite prior professional success, their confidence in their abilities is in the toilet, and they second-guess their well-founded decisions.

Whatever the reason you want to return to work or change careers, when it’s time to switch it up or head back to work, it’s not simple. And your reasons to return—whether to earn a little more for a depleted retirement account, become the household breadwinner, transform years of volunteer experience into paid work, make a needed change with an unhappy situation in your current role or company, or maybe simply to get back into the swing of things, workwise—don’t matter.

What matters is plotting out your back-to-business strategy—refreshing your traditional job-search tools, developing a modern social profile, perfecting your pitch so people want to talk with you more, and educating and refreshing your corporate research skills so you get paid what you’re worth.

We want to teach you how to play the game so you can get back to work, with ways to circumvent the traditional hiring system, leveling the playing field for nontraditional candidates. Back to Business lays out the steps, telling real-life stories from our community. We give readers everything they need to overcome those barriers and get that next job, with fantastic examples of how everyday women get back to the workplace, regardless of their background.

And we’re happy to report the good news: When women learn to articulate what they want and utilize their connections—personal, professional, community—they can get back to the work they want, shape it in a new way that suits their current and future life demands, and do it in an unapologetic manner.

On the corporate side, more opportunities emerge every day. Companies like Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Amazon run returnships, aimed at reincorporating women who have stepped away. Start-up companies, while young, value and are willing to hire experienced help, sometimes on a full-time basis, and sometimes on a part-time basis to help them get up and off the ground, leveraging women’s proven experience and skills. Consulting contract companies abound, staffing roles with women returning after breaks who want to change roles and careers. Forward-looking companies that recognize the ongoing lack of women in key roles are increasingly mandating women and returners get a seat at the table. And as women return, they’re bringing other returners along with them.

Childcare Cost Kicks Them Out and Keeps Them Out

The annual cost of full-time childcare rivals the cost of a year of public college education. Women face the trade-off of working just to stay afloat in the job market until their children get into school and spend the vast majority of their salary on childcare. The Center for American Progress looked at populations in eight states and described roughly half as childcare deserts where affordable childcare isn’t even accessible. When parents are still paying off their own college debt, investing in a first home, saving for their retirement, it quickly becomes prohibitively expensive.

Childcare cost and access are the single biggest factors pushing women out of the job market and keeping them out. It’s even worse for people of color, who already face a whole additional set of hiring and recruiting challenges.

Workplaces Lack Family Flexibility

Women who come through The Swing Shift report that a major factor that booted them out of the workplace is the lack of schedule accommodations that allow them to successfully have a job and spend time with their families. They want to retain their jobs. But the structure of the modern workplace—with expected norms of early on-site arrivals, late-night departures, and last-minute and weekend meetings—stretches women between home and work. The COVID-19 pandemic threw this issue into even starker relief, with women bearing the brunt of at home schooling and childcare while facing the same work demands without relief. Many times these demands lead to burnout. Faced with doubling down or stepping back, they choose the latter.

Health Issues Overtake Work

A child or spouse or parent (or maybe yourself) gets sick. A kid has special needs, who requires additional support that schools can’t accommodate. Parents age and need help to adjust to new living situations. Historically, it is women who come to the fore to care for their family members, providing hands-on care, transportation, tracking, and organization of these new and different needs. Seventy percent of family caregivers are women, who spend an average of twenty-two hours a week engaged in this care, according to the Family Caregiver Alliance, and this work is mostly unpaid.

Relocation

Sometimes women are pulled along as a trailing spouse. Their partner gets a new job in a new city, but they lack a job, family, and social network. This is particularly acute when it is an international relocation, where the trailing spouse is unable to work because of visa restrictions.

Professional Isolation Results

Collectively, regardless of the reason, these women become isolated professionally. They’ve taken breaks for profound and understandable reasons, and yet they’re dismissed and diminished. And this professional isolation disrupts women’s return to the workforce as well as their ability to shift into roles and industries that allow them better flexibility to manage both home and professional demands. Isolation manifests itself in self-doubt, based on lack of knowledge of current business and hiring trends, as well as lack of familiarity with current technology and no recent, professional contact network.

This is messed up and broken, both at a corporate and individual level.

Women make these choices for compelling, sometimes heartbreaking reasons. They shouldn’t have to apologize or excuse themselves because childcare costs are out of sight. Or because their family needs more attention. Or because their child got a life-threatening illness. Or because their parents are struggling with dementia. They should be proud of the choices they made. These are the everyday events that all people face as they grow and age.

Women who formerly focused exclusively on their careers now need to recalibrate work’s role in their hierarchy of importance. They’re taking into account a richer set of home and personal life responsibilities. They want—and in most cases need (61 percent of US households are dual earners)—to work. That work situation has changed as the need for flexibility becomes imperative to a successful return, and these additional levels of discernment and decision making are introduced to the process.

So, for most women who are looking to switch roles, careers, industries, including those who are returning from a break, it’s not as easy as applying for a job, buying a new interview outfit, and giving two weeks’ notice to their home life.

Especially when women want to recalibrate their work and home lives to best accommodate new and incremental life circumstances, they face barriers to shifting roles or industries, or returning to work, that most men don’t encounter. Women experience explicit and hidden bias in recruiting and hiring managers regarding their appropriateness as a candidate. Because they’ve been on a break, they are automatically sifted out of technology-managed candidate funnels.

And when they spend time on playgrounds, in nursing facilities, at home care, or even in a siloed office environment, their network of professional contacts compresses.

A few statistics that The Swing Shift struggles to reconcile concern the prevalence of working women who go home to care for their children. Ninety-four percent of stay-at-home parents are female in heteronormative relationships. However, a Pew Research Center study shows that 40 percent of American households include a woman as the main or sole earner.

One thing we want to understand is why women are walking away from these higher-paying roles? It’s outside the scope of this book, but, wow, this bugs us. The structures of workplaces, with lack of flexibility and scant friendliness to family environments, are the major contributing factors here.

Why They Leave

We know why women depart traditional work. We’ve researched this question and, it’s not surprising, the focus is predicated on family issues. Two-thirds report childbearing and work and family life flexibility as the main reasons for their departure from corporate work.

Forty-five percent left work to have children

Twenty-two percent report their job wasn’t flexible for family life

Seventeen percent looked to pivot due to job dissatisfaction and burnout

Why They Want to Return

The reasons they need to return and shift to higher-paying work include the following:

Produce Additional Family Income: Sixty-one percent of US households are dual earners and, with children in school, the childcare cost burden is eased enough to consider returning.

Change in Marital Status: After stepping back from traditional work, women suddenly are responsible for paying the bills on their own. This is especially hard during traumatic life events.

Augment Retirement Savings: The Employee Benefit Research Institute estimates 41 percent of US households headed by people ages thirty-five to sixty-four are likely to run out of money in retirement. Increasingly women recognize they need to pitch into the pot.

Empty Nest: After years focused on their children’s and family’s requirements, midlife women need additional purpose as their children depart and they are confronted by what to do next. Many times, they are facing one or more of the three factors above as an added element.

Why They Want to Switch

Reports abound in the business press showing that an enormous number of American female workers—up to 75 percent—want to switch roles or careers. And we know that 50 percent of women who return are looking to do something different.

We hear this desire for change from both returners and people who want to shift to different roles or industries. The reasons range from need for more pay, dissatisfaction with their ability to grow in their role, diminished opportunities as they age, outmoded industries and roles—including journalism,