Reentering the workforce after a career break can be a formidable journey for women, despite their rich skill sets, experiences, and unwavering motivation. They often encounter hurdles such as gender-based discrimination, a scarcity of suitable job opportunities, and traditional hiring methods that fail to acknowledge their distinct life experiences. Moreover, women returning to work may grapple with a crisis of confidence and self-doubt, fearing that their time away has eroded their skills and professional worth. This amalgam of challenges frequently thwarts their pursuit of meaningful employment and the realization of their full potential in the professional sphere. How can we pave the way for a triumphant return?
To delve deeper into this critical topic, we turn to Pratima Lakshmanan, Head, Strategic Initiatives, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai. In this insightful article, she not only delves into the challenges and transformations women face when returning to work after a career break, but also examines the evolution of returnship programs as a compelling solution to help women return to the workforce. These initiatives offer a glimmer of hope to women seeking to regain their professional confidence and momentum!
To gain further insights into the multifaceted challenges women face during career breaks and explore strategies that empower them to overcome these hurdles successfully, please read on:
In the Indian context the break from work is usually for family reasons owing to our cultural underpinnings. Tackling the demons inside her head is a challenge unto itself; when she does finally return to the workplace after a prolonged break – her personality, sense of priorities, skillsets, confidence, understanding of what she can and cannot do have all undergone a sea-change. Workplaces that get this are the ones that are able to successfully welcome women back to work after a career break.
Returnships per se also include veterans, sabbatical breaks etc. and have been around for many years in some form or shape. However, over the last few years, focus on women’s empowerment and paid work has brought a spotlight on ‘women’s returnship’. In a global workplace where skills and talent are in short supply, many companies world-wide have deployed returnship programs in different formats to tap into this enormous and unutilized talent pool. Usually structured as paid-internships, these engagements allow women to upgrade their skills, transition to the workplace in a phased manner while maintaining an agreeable work-life balance. Amazon India’s ‘Rekindle’ is a 16-week paid internship for women whereas Salesforce India’s ‘Return to Work’ Program is a six-month long ‘on the job’ type of skilling program. VMWare’s Taara offers free on-line technical education to women on VMWare’s products and technologies at the end of which they are deployed in appropriate projects within the company; Accenture’s ‘Career Reboot’ and LTIMindtree’s ‘Revive’ offer focused interventions designed to bridge skill gaps in returnship candidates and allows them the choice of flexible, part-time or full-time employment. Such engagements are also bolstered internally with excellently crafted mentorship programs with women in senior/leadership positions actively reaching out to and offering support and guidance to women in junior-level positions.
Many companies are also curating these ‘women’s returnship’ pathways as a way to achieve their ambitious diversity targets (increasing the overall percentage of women employed in their company) with great success. Freshworks wanted women to make up at least 30% of the workforce by the end of 2020. They met that goal and increased goal to 40% with 20% holding leadership positions by the end of 2022 aided in part by the success of their ‘ReStart’ program that seeks to bridge the gap between one’s passion and potential.
Taking a leaf from these, Great Lakes has curated a women’s returnship program called ‘ENCORE’ (Enabling New Career Opportunities through Returnship Education) for women on a career-break of 6 months and above. This 4-months program offers self-paced and virtual learning modules in various functional/technical domains supported by periodic in-person personality and soft skills interventions to enable successful transitions to the workplace. The women participants also have access to our career services to help place them in appropriate roles in marquee companies.
While all of this is certainly commendable and remarkable, I want to offer a word of caution - Initiatives that seek to off-set long-standing disparities are seldom successful without advocacy from the stronger components of the system. People in positions of power and the men-folk within the organization must be sensitized to understand the significance of the women’s career-break and recognize the need to create an environment that is welcoming and supportive of their needs. Otherwise, a poorly structured women’s returnship initiative will breed condescension and resentment causing more harm than good.
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