Introduction: Strategies for Stay-At-Home-Parents Re-entering The Workforce

Flexforce shares advice for overcoming some of the common challenges encountered when going back to work. 

Re-entering the workforce after a stint as a stay-at-home-parent can be a daunting proposition.  How will you explain and justify to prospective employers the time you took off?  How do you shake the creeping insecurity you might feel about the adequacy of your skills and experience for the positions you want?  Are you really ready to enter the workforce, or are you fooling yourself and your family? 

Article Series

We work with many candidates grappling with these issues.  In fact, since we focus almost exclusively on recruiting and placing part-time business professionals, well over half of our candidates are Stay-at-Home-Parents transitioning back into the workforce after taking time out to care for family.  We have seen first hand many who have made the transition successfully and are now enjoying a healthy balance of work and family.  But we have also witnessed those who have awkward forays back into the workforce only to realize they were not ready.

As part of a series on strategies for effectively re-entering the workforce, we hope to share the lessons we have learned as well as some advice from our candidates for re-entering the professional workplace.  We will focus on three of the most common challenges our candidates face:

Part 1:  Handling the “GAP” – how to best position in your resume and during interviews the time you took off from your career (the gap)

Part 2:  Regaining Confidence – how to feel good about yourself and your skills and make the prospective employer feel good about them too

Part 3:   Committing – how to make sure you and your family are ready for you to re-enter the workforce

Setting the Stage

Before we begin, let us set the stage for the employer climate into which most of our candidates enter.  The majority of our clients are small, rapidly growing businesses.  They are in desperate need of experienced resources to support their business growth, but they have tight budgets and little time to train new hires.  They need on-demand experts that can hit the ground running.  We have found this client base to be open to the untapped re-entering parent talent pool, especially for part-time arrangements.  It is a good value and fit for their business models.  However, even this set of clients can be anxious about hiring former Stay-At-Home-Parents because of long-held stereotypes and perceptions.  They are worried the candidates will not be as committed.  They are worried the candidates will be inflexible and unable to roll with the inevitable ups and downs of the workload.  They are worried that the candidates’ skills have gotten stale and that they may be out-of-touch with new business norms.  Of course, these are the same anxieties that the candidates have, so the fears feed one another.

 This article series attempts to help combat these perceptions by preparing the prospective employee to market him/herself in the best possible way, ease employer or personal apprehensions about the candidate’s preparedness to enter the workforce, and facilitate a transition that is as smooth as possible and a win-win for both the new employee and employer.

After you read each article, we welcome your input and advice, particularly from Stay-At-Home-Parents who have recently re-entered or are in the process of  re-entering the workforce.  Please add your comments below about what helped you most, mistakes you made, things you would do the same, or things you would do differently.  Thank you!