I had my first baby around the same time that I was completing a decade of working. Once the initial euphoria of motherhood settles down and maternity leave ends, all women face a dilemma. Some call it guilt, some responsibility and some love for their child. I call it a sense of awareness that sets in, about oneself. You take a career break because you want to be with your child – either because you want to or because there is no support system.
You don’t regret that decision, but something within you rears its head – Will I get back to full-time working and how, what about the years, I have invested in my profession? If you have loved your career, this is natural. From my experience of that turmoil, I figured out that a 100% career break by isolating myself from the corporate world, was not an option. I just had to find ways to remain connected and energized by it. That helped me to get my first freelance project the month after I left my full-time role. A lot of trials (and some errors!) later I found what worked for me.
So here are some of those strategies that I explored. It’s not about replicating steps that one individual took. If you want to script your own career, understand these steps, assess their applicability to you and most importantly, have the determination to keep going rather than giving up.
1. Revisit your core and reinvent – Sometimes you fall into the trap of your past accomplishments. Your career might have been an extremely sought after one, but when the axis of your world shifted to your child, things changed. The same career would not help you remain employable – I loved being an HR consultant and meeting clients. But that possibility was no longer available. But my core expertise (HR) had not changed. So I revisited my core and shifted my path towards significantly different roles, like content curation and development. I spent my precious ‘free time’ researching about HR trends and companies working in those spaces, to see if I could fit into those.
2. Up-skill, Re-skill – Up-skilling in our areas of expertise is our comfort zone. Re-skilling is what causes some concern. One thing that I realized early on was that it was absolutely essential to learn more than what I knew, and not in the areas that I had skills in. It was easier to position myself as a Rewards consultant due to my experience. It was far more difficult to learn about Diversity & Inclusion and Social Media Engagement, areas that I had only superficial knowledge of. Sounds like a disaster in the making, right? It wasn’t. Because I kept my end goal very clear. I wanted skills that suited my situation and were also sought-after!
3. Open up your mind – I cannot emphasize on this enough. An open mind is the only way to move ahead when you want to reinvent your career while on a break. Learn to break out of the mould of what you were an expert on, in the past. Past expertise is important. But opening your mind to different roles and work possibilities is essential. I see many instances of women who are hesitant to take on something new while they are on a break. That hesitation itself, tends to put you into the back-seat because it stops you from learning something new.
4. Network as much as you can – I spent a lot of time reaching out to past colleagues, clients and friends when I started freelancing. It might seem strange but I had a daily phone reminder for myself to connect with at least 1 person. Networking is not about asking for work. It is about being connected with those who are engaged in full-time careers. Because for me, the more I spoke to them, the more insights I got about what was happening in the rapidly changing business world, while I was at home.
5. Balancing focus on career as well as your child – Motherhood and managing your career can be overwhelming and exhausting especially when you are a new mother. That is also a reason for women to decide on a break. The trick lies in balancing the two and realizing that you are not a super-human. I made two big changes – one, to divide all tasks into essentials and non-essentials, and reduce my own involvement in the non-essentials. The second was to build a schedule around my child’s timings – when he needed my entire attention, when he required me to simply be around but not actively involved and so on. These helped me to plan better.
6. Personal discipline – We can make a time-table or to-do lists. But at the end of it, the biggest requirement to manage your time is personal discipline. If you set a schedule to work certain hours in a day, you must follow that as closely as possible. Similarly, if you commit to spend time with your child on certain activities, you must make that time for him or her. It sounds challenging but with effort and practice it is easier to carry out.
7. Fighting the taboo in the industry – There will always be naysayers who will doubt your capabilities. Projects especially if you are restricted to home will be hard to come by. And these will lead to self-doubt. For a variety of reasons and biases, corporate organizations find it difficult to understand the capability of women to integrate work and motherhood. So, they tend to avoid hiring them even for short term projects. But keep up your learning in your areas of expertise, make sure to learn new skills and ensure that you are visible as an expert, virtually. These will help you fight the preconceived notions much better.
The bottom-line is that being home-bound or choosing to take a career break is not about a complete career shutdown. It is entirely in your hands to revisit the purpose and vision you have for yourself, and take every possible step to make that happen – you owe it to yourself!
