The five steps that helped me to get back to work

Wondering how or indeed if you will ever get back to work again? You are not alone - I remember that feeling well. Here are a few practical steps based on my own experience, that will help you to re-establish your existing skills and learn new ones, build your confidence and broaden your network. 

1. Take an online course. When I was looking for work after a career break, I found myself out of touch with social media. I was recommended a course from HootSuite, The Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing. The course offers 6 modules from optimising your social media profile (great if you are looking for work) to social media marketing strategy (useful if you are looking to set up your own business), and you can take a certification exam for your CV. I also took the Coursera Learning How to Learn course last year to develop more general skills - it helped me to focus and be methodical, and to learn memory and time management techniques. Taking a course demonstrates your commitment, your enthusiasm for a subject, your desire to keep current and your appetite to learn something new, and is a good talking point at an interview or during an informal chat. However be sure of why you want to do the course before starting to have the best chance of seeing it through. Are you looking to get a recognised qualification from a prestigious university? Or perhaps you just want to bring a skill up to date. See the previous post on MOOCs here  to read more about the range of free courses available. And if you're relaunching in STEM, do look the new Reboot your STEM career course from Open Learn, the free learning platform of the Open University. 

2. Find skills-based volunteer opportunities. While looking for a paid role, you could sharpen your skills and put some of this theory into practise by volunteering. This doesn’t have to be formal - you could try your school parents’ association (I practiced my events planning and fundraising skills that way) or help a friend setting up a new business (I put my rusty HTML coding and design skills to the test by helping to build a new website). It’s amazing to see your skills valued and used in a different context. You'll find that “you still have it” after all, and this is very reassuring and empowering. Plan your strategic volunteering by reading our previous post on the subject here.

3. Get feedback on your CV. Ask your friends and ex-colleagues for feedback; it’s even better if you can send them a job spec that caught your eye along with your CV. I found that it helped to get a fresh pair of eyes looking at my CV and assessing objectively my suitability for a particular job.

4. Attend an event. Take a look at events targeting women looking to return to work organised by relevant professional bodies and associations, alumni groups and local communities. In my case, attending the Mumsnet Workfest event last year was a catalyst. I had to be dragged by a friend to sign up, as I was uncertain about my professional aspirations or what I would get out of the event.  But against the odds, I felt energised by the women I met, who reminded me of what I had to offer. I came back with practical advice (on my CV, on a job search strategy, on interviews) and was inspired by Katerina and Julianne’s session on returning to work after a career break. I was armed with new tools to look for work that would work for me. For events listing and Women Returners' talks and workshops, check our website and our monthly newsletter.

5. Get a mentor. A mentor can really help give you focus in your job search. I took part last year in the Steps Ahead mentoring pilot scheme, facilitated by the CIPD. My mentor was chosen according to the industry I wanted to move into. She provided me with valuable insight into this industry, how to tailor my CV and what a typical role would entail, and gave me a lot of encouragement, support and help. If you're a STEM returner, do look at the free mentoring available through the new MentorSET programme. 

These actions helped me to assess my situation more objectively, to determine how soon I wanted to go back to work, in what capacity and for what kind of organisation. While this is not an exhaustive list, why not try investigating one of these suggestions? You might be surprised by how much closer you get to your professional goal and how much more confident you feel at each step.

Posted by Muriel

First steps towards a board role

The Equality and Human Rights Commission have just released their new report on board appointment practices in the UK’s largest 350 listed firms. More than 60% of these firms have not met a voluntary target of 25% female board members. If you're interested in boosting these numbers, this week's post by Rowena Ironside, Chair of Women on Boards UK, explores what types of roles you can seek in the boardroom, how to go about it, and what you can bring to the table. 

Some of us are fortunate to get an insight into the boardroom early on in our career. In my case this was thanks to being an executive director of a start-up business at the age of 30. But for most people what goes on in the boardroom remains a mystery until very late in their career. And if you don’t know what boards do, how do you know if your skills are relevant or if the role is one that you will enjoy?

Women on Boards (WOB) exists to fill this information gap. Our mission is to influence a measurable increase in the proportion of women both on boards and in “pipeline” roles at the executive level. And to achieve increased transparency in the board recruitment process, because at the moment the majority of board roles (public sector aside) are never advertised.

The good news is that the single most valuable asset in most boardrooms is common sense. Accompanied by the courage to ask tough questions and challenge the status quo from time to time.

Boards exist to challenge and support the executive team. They add value through a combination of collective judgement and the deep, specific expertise of each director. As an individual board member you don’t need to know everything; you don’t even need to have expertise in the “core business” of the organisation. As long as you bring a specific skill, experience or network that is valuable to the organisation at that point in time. For example:  

• Don’t assume that you need to be a horticulturalist or an environmentalist to join the board of Kew Gardens. They may have a gap for digital marketing or event management skills on their board this year.
•  First board role? Not everyone around the table needs to have years of boardroom experience. A board that is explicitly searching for past governance experience is not going to be anybody’s first board role. But most boards are equally interested in your breadth of experience and professional skills.

A common mistake is defining your options too narrowly by thinking you have to stay – or at least start – in “your sector”. Some charities need asset management and M&A experience and you may find that a Public Sector board is in need of your technology or risk management skills.

Women on Boards is there to help you navigate this complexity. Our resources and support are designed to provide a structured pathway to a board position that is right for you. As Clara Durodie, one of our members described it last year: “It felt as if someone was holding my hand, guiding me with care and skill”. WOB provides:

1. Workshops, events and masterclasses that combine strategic insights and pragmatic advice. Our Getting Started: Realising your Board Potential workshop is a fast-paced tour through everything you need to know about directorship and how to do yourself justice as a candidate. Our Boardroom Conversations are designed to “open the curtains” so that you can be inspired by the opportunities on boards in a sector you haven't previously considered, or for in-depth insights from current non-executives in an area you are targeting.
2. Access to board vacancies across all sectors – most weeks we have at least 150 non-executive director, trustee and governor vacancies on the WOB Vacancy Board.
3.  Feedback on your Board CV. Writing a non executive profile that does you justice takes time and requires insight into what board members actually do. We will help.
4.  Personal advice, connections and encouragement. This is WOB’s USP.  We will support you with targeted interventions at key points along the way, like when you are preparing for a board interview. We also do hugs if you are recovering from coming second for that role you really wanted.
5. A rich Resource Centre of reference materials, research, articles and success stories. Our On Board page is my personal favourite. 

There are thousands of different boards across the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. WOB believes that there is a board role for everyone who wants one and that you are never too young to understand what goes on at the top table. The boardroom is where capital is allocated and where the moral and ethical standards for organisations in all sectors are set. We need more female voices at the table.

For more information about strategic volunteering, read our previous post here.

Rowena Ironside is Chair of Women on Boards UK, a non-executive director of the Digital Catapult and sits on the Governing Body of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. Before “going plural”, Rowena spent 25 years in the ICT industry, starting her career writing software in Australia; building and selling an IT services business in London and finally running several multi-national professional and managed services businesses in the software and hosting industries. She took a year’s break in 2002 to complete the Sloan Masters at London Business School.

For more information on Women on Boards, join The WOB Network. 

Posted by Muriel

Lending your Skills to get Ahead - How to do ‘Strategic Volunteering’

Strategic volunteering can build your skills, be intellectually demanding and provide a route back to work after a career break. We hope this week's second post by Jill Ridley-Smith will inspire you to explore this route further.

The new CEO of the £225 million turnover business turns to us, the Board, saying he wants our input into the development of his five-year strategic plan. He also wants to initiate an acquisition strategy to diversify revenues because he’s worried the core business is too dependent on a single source of income. His team have identified the first potential acquisition and will present it to us for our consideration in the next meeting. He surmises that his inherited management team and organisation structure aren’t right to deliver the new plan; where are the gaps, strengths and weaknesses in the senior team? He knows his top line is vulnerable as customers are increasingly more discerning and demanding and the business needs to respond - well, given students now have to pay University tuition fees this is hardly unexpected. Yes, this is what it’s like being on the Board of Governors for one of the largest Universities in the UK.

There are almost limitless possibilities in the non-profit sector for individuals willing to give up some of their time and expertise - boards of charities, sports bodies, education, and Government organisations to name a few. These roles can be interesting, relevant, thought-provoking and rewarding. The individuals who take them on are respected and appreciated. This month on the website Women on Boards there are 220 roles advertised and roughly two thirds of these are in non-profit organisations. Most of these roles are pro-bono (i.e. unpaid), but they often cover expenses. As very few of us have the luxury of being able to work for free, the clue is in the term ‘strategic’ - if you are considering this type of volunteering as a route back into the workplace, it needs to be volunteering with an agenda. This could be to take a role that leverages your historical business experience, or if you are looking for a career change, a role where you gain experience in a new sector; or it could simply be to get back in touch with the working world and become current again. 

As with every job search, it’s improbable a CV enhancing role as a strategic volunteer will fall into your lap. It requires re-engaging with your old business networks, getting out there and making new connections; for instance, you could be very pleasantly surprised by what can come from simply being sociable at the school gates. Be mindful too that strategic volunteering roles are ‘proper’ jobs (to get one you’ll need a good CV, references and to deliver at the interview) and these roles carry considerable responsibility. When working on the Board of a charity under the auspices of the Charity Commission or a public sector body that manages Government money, the buck stops with you. Boards must have good governance, appropriate risk measurement and assessment and must sufficiently scrutinise financials and probe the operational decisions of the management. As a good example, the Trustees of Kids Company simply did not apply the necessary rigour required; this is an extract from the House of Commons Committee report into the collapse of the business: “Trustees relied upon wishful thinking and false optimism and became inured to the precariousness of the charity’s financial situation.”

So, assuming you are not solely motivated by the social cause, why strategically volunteer if it’s no easier to get a volunteering role than a paid one and the role comes with a weighty responsibility? Well, the attraction is in the relatively limited time commitment for the intellectual return: the norm is quarterly meetings and their prep, a few strategy days and a commitment to a few years’ service. When you’ve got very young children, time is so precious and we all do our very best to juggle work and family life. For me, at that time, strategic volunteering was a manageable commitment that kept me on the career track. I started with one, then two strategic volunteering roles and this has now morphed into fully ‘going plural’. It means that rather than working full-time for one company, I’m self-employed and I have a number of non-executive director positions with different companies.

I still do some unpaid business mentoring and I have one pro-bono NED (Non-Executive Director) position but it’s less of a means-to-an-end now so I can enjoy it for what it is and the social benefit that comes from it. I lent my time to get ahead and it’s been a win-win journey for me and the organisations I remain committed to.

Jill Ridley-Smith works as a Business Mentor and is a Non-Executive Director on three Boards. She took a career break in 2009 after a successful career in Private Equity with HgCapital and prior to this she held management roles at GlaxoSmithKline and LEK Consulting. She has an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management. You can read more of Jill's return to work story here.

For more information on becoming a trustee, also visit Getting on Board, a charity that helps individuals become new leaders in communities through board-level volunteering. Watch out for more information on their new campaign in early March that is aimed at encouraging women on a career break to take up charity board positions.


Posted by Muriel

How 'strategic' volunteering can support your return to work

If you've been out of the workplace for many years, we often recommend that you consider strategic volunteering, but it may not be clear to you exactly what we mean by this or how it can be a route back to work. For me, strategic volunteering was a crucial step in getting back to work after my career break; I reflected on this during a trustees' meeting this week (taking time out from Women Returners). As with so many people who take a career break, I had lost any sense of myself as a professional person possessing management and leadership skills that would be of use outside my domestic role. Through joining a charity board, in a non-executive role, I had the opportunity to rebuild my self-belief in a variety of ways:

• talking with other professionals, as equals, on matters of strategy, policy and operations reminded me that I knew about this stuff!
• taking on specific projects, such as overhauling the financial reporting systems, was a concrete opportunity to contribute and make a difference
• feedback from my colleagues was positive and encouraging (in contrast to the normal complaints from my children)
• I learned that my different way of looking at matters (from being the sole female and not steeped in the charity's historical way of operating) was valued.

What separates strategic volunteering from the other unpaid roles you may have taken on during your break, from class rep to community volunteer, is that the work you are doing creates a platform for your return, either through refreshing or developing your skills, or by being an entry route to a new role. 

Strategic volunteering comes in many guises. These are examples of other people who've used it as a starting point for their new career:

• Jill volunteered as a business start-up adviser which allowed her to create a portfolio career with a number of NED positions.  You can read her story here
• For Suzanne, being PTA chair was a perfect way to revive her dormant people management and influencing skills (there is nothing harder than engaging a group of volunteers), allowed her to be creative in a public arena and gain experience in presenting and speaking to large groups. A bonus was that getting to know her co-chair led to them setting up a business together when their term of office ended.

You can read some other inspiring examples in our previous post: Finding your way back through strategic volunteering.

If you have a story to share, we'd love to hear it!

Posted by Katerina   

A returner's success story - Business mentoring as platform for future

As we reach the end of January, you might be finding your good intentions of finding a way back to work are slipping.  We hope this guest blog by Jill Ridley-Smith will inspire you and give a boost to your motivation.

Over drinks at a Christmas party, my neighbour recommended I read, in his words, “a gripping Scandi Noir murder mystery novel” by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Given the synopsis, I wasn’t expecting these words in the first few pages:     

“Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I … do what?  Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children, bring them home, undress them, bath them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards.  It is a struggle and it is not heroic.  Nothing I previously experienced warned me about the invasion into your life that having children entails.  That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life.  Not mine at any rate.” 

He must have been having a bad day!  But nevertheless I recognise the sentiment.  After having my second child I quit the City but continue to find myself emotionally split between wanting to bring up my kids myself and wanting a career. Just like Karl Ove, I’m not completely fulfilled by full-time motherhood but nor am I willing give it up.  Consequently, I try to balance being with the kids and working whilst laying the ground work for a future when they need me less and I can work more.

To understand my work options better, a few years ago I went to a conference about returning to work after a career break. Based on their book “Back on the Career Track”, Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin introduced me what they call the “Three C’s of Career Relaunch”: Control, Content and Compensation.  It’s different for everyone, but for me, I want control over my time spent working (to meet my desire for balance between motherhood and work), I want intellectual stimulation in the content of the work I do and, because they said you couldn’t have them all, I decided I was willing to trade some compensation.

We were encouraged to see the career break as an opportunity for introspection: to critically appraise how much we enjoyed the work we did before and to realise that it might be a mistake to go back to an old role.  It dawned on me that in my previous career in Private Equity I had most enjoyed working with management teams to improve company performance; the deal doing or the returns from investing were not the big pull that they are for some people. I realised too that at Mums’ coffee mornings I was always drawn to conversations about business ideas and I relished chats with mum-entrepreneurs.  So plausible career paths seemed to be either pursing entrepreneurship (but what was the idea?), or business consultancy (I had been a strategy consultant), or “going plural” and taking non-Exec Director appointments. 

In December 2012 I went along to an Entrepreneurship conference at Olympia where I met the team from Start-Up Direct.  Then in its infancy, the Start-Up Loans initiative was to pair up Government loans with business mentorship for young entrepreneurs.   It struck me that being a business mentor could meet my personal “control” and “content” goals without being a huge time commitment. I volunteered and shortly thereafter was introduced to Karoline Gross, CEO of Smartzer.  Two years later, I still work with Karoline and my journey with her has been hugely rewarding.

Initially I thought taking on a mentee would keep me stimulated and treading water until I found the “real” job. However, I now mentor two young people through Start-Up Direct (an evolution of Start-Up Loans) and I have a third mentee who is a peer of mine from Business School.  For each, my mentoring focus is different and is adapted to their needs.  We meet roughly once a month and our conversations address both pressing business issues and planning for the future.  I love the work which involves providing a mixture of support, coaching and direct advice. 

We often talk about money, and my finance background is good for this, but other regular topics are sales and marketing, managing people and strategies for growth.  I’ve learned that entrepreneurship can be very lonely, so I am a sounding board, a person who holds you to your time lines and someone who helps you find solutions to problems.

Most of my work currently is volunteering, so I have compromised on compensation, but I see it as a launch-pad for the future.  I find the work uplifting, fun, challenging, stimulating and interesting.  Entrepreneurs by their very nature are engaged, ambitious and driven; their vibrancy and enthusiasm is contagious!  Also I know I make a genuine difference.  My wisdom and business experience is valued and put to good effect. 

Indeed, I have already used the mentoring as a platform for taking on additional roles including being Board member for Nottingham Trent University.  As for the future, entrepreneurship itself still beckons, I’m dipping my toes into being an Angel Investor and I may yet focus on “going plural” with NED roles.  I often feel I am the consummate juggler of work, school, kids, home and family but keeping all the balls in the air is the way I keep happy and fulfilled.  Karl Ove should try it; as the book is called “Death in the Family” I’m reading on in trepidation… 

Jill Ridley-Smith works as a Business Mentor and is a Non-Executive Director on three Boards.  She took a career break in 2009 after a successful career in Private Equity with HgCapital and prior to this she held management roles at GlaxoSmithKline and LEK Consulting.  She has an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

Find your way back to work through Strategic Volunteering

Volunteering is a common activity among former professionals who are on a career break, whether or not they wish to return to work at some point. Charities, PTAs and local campaigns are always in need of additional support and committed people: for women on a career break they can provide the companionship and sense of purpose that they previously found in their career, as well as essential flexibility.

It is very easy to fill your time with voluntary roles, especially once your children are in school and you can quickly feel very busy, productive and valued.  If you are thinking of returning to work at some stage, though, it is worth thinking about volunteering that can help you with your return either through developing your existing skills or acquiring new ones and, additionally, building your network. This is what we mean by strategic volunteering - work that does more than just make you feel that you are giving something back.

We have worked with many women for whom strategic volunteering was their launch-pad back to work. In some cases this was a deliberate approach and in others, there was a more organic development with the woman discovering a new interest or uncovering a previously hidden talent. You will find more details about some of these examples in our success stories. 

These returners planned their volunteering deliberately as a route back to work: 

Sue* was a volunteer Games Maker Selection interviewer, with me, for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. She'd previously had a career in HR and used the opportunity of our weekly shift to connect with the London 2012 HR team to find out about other permanent roles in the organisation. Three months into our volunteering she was employed there.

Amy* a former City lawyer volunteered in the legal department of a national charity, advising on contractual matters which was her expertise. After some months she negotiated a move to the trusts and legacy team where she built the knowledge and expertise that enabled her to apply for employment in her target area of private client practice.

In our success stories you can read about Caroline Boyd who joined the Parent Gym as a volunteer trainer/facilitator following a 4 year break from a career in marketing. She loved this new type of work so much that after a year she successfully applied for a permanent training role with the Mind Gym, the commercial arm.

Lynda* a former radio producer used a series of volunteer roles as stepping stones to a new career, starting from the school PTA where she ran a portfolio of increasingly successful fundraising and social events for a number of years. Having regained her professional confidence she volunteered as the campaign manager for a London mayoral candidate, using her journalistic instincts to develop an effective PR campaign from a standing start. Armed with this experience and many new contacts, Lynda was employed by a new political party to manage its PR activity.

If you have a strategic volunteering success story to share, we'd love to hear it!

*names have been changed

Posted by Katerina