8 Tips for Parents Returning to the Workforce

If you've been a stay-at-home parent who's now returning to the workforce, you might feel intimidated. After all, you're competing against candidates who didn't step away from a professional track, your skills might feel rusty and it might have been years since you interviewed ^[1]. But with some effort and the right mindset, you can get yourself back to work.

Here are eight key tips to make the transition from stay-at-home mom or dad to working parent.

1. Don't put child-rearing on your resume as a job. Some parents who are returning to work are tempted to list their time at home as its own job, complete with titles, such as "domestic engineer," "family CEO" or "household manager," and duties, such as scheduling, budgeting and child care logistics. Don't do this. Your resume ^[2] is for professional accomplishments and employment where you were accountable to someone outside of your family. And you don't want to come across as if you don't understand why the difference matters.

2. Explain the gap in employment in your cover letter. Employers will wonder about the gap since you last worked, but you can simply explain in your cover letter that you took a few years (or however long it's been) to stay home with your child but are now eager to return to work full time.

3. Don't try to hide your time away from work by using a "functional resume" format. Stay-at-home parents are often advised to avoid a standard chronological resume format and instead use a "functional resume" to downplay their work gap. Functional resumes don't show employment dates or a clear career chronology, but instead simply list skills and achievements. The problem is that the format is an immediate red flag to hiring managers ^[3] that you're trying to hide something. It makes it impossible to understand what you did and when you did it. Functional resumes are often an instant deal breaker for employers. They're not w orth the risk.

4. Lean on your network. Your network will be one of your most important assets when you're ready to look for work again. When you're competing against candidates with more recent work experience, having a connection to the hiring manager or a referral from someone who knows you can be the thing that gets you an interview and serious consideration.

Hopefully you've been maintaining your network long before you began thinking about returning to work by staying in touch with past colleagues, occasionally going out to lunch and just generally not letting those connections lapse. But if you haven't done that, it's not too late. You can still reach out to past colleagues, classmates, neighbors, even parents of your kids' friends, and let them know that you're looking for work.

5. If possible, do some contract work while you're out. Completing a few contract projects will give you more recent work to put on your resume ^[4], and it will start building a group of new contacts who might eventually hire you for full-time work or refer you to jobs at other companies.

6. Join a professional organization in your field. Professional organizations can be great places to meet people in your field, get job leads and position yourself more strongly for your return. You can amplify the benefits of membership even further by volunteering to serve on the organization's board or one of its committees, as well as attending its networking events.

7. Talk with your partner about how you'll divide child care duties now that you're returning to work. If your partner has been working while you've been at home, he or she may assume that you'll continue to be the primary person responsible for juggling school pick-up and drop-off, homework supervision, packing lunches, field trips and everything else you juggled when you were at home full time. But just because it used to be your job doesn't mean that it should continue to be. Now that you're both working, it's time to revisit that division of labor and come up with a new plan that's fair to you both. You may even need your partner to take on more than half while you're getting settled in your new job. Whatever you decide, don't assume that you're both on the same page. Sit down and talk it through.

8. Make sure you have a solid child care plan with backup options. If your daycare won't take sick kids, do you have a backup sitter, an agreement with your spouse to split the care on those days or some other plan? Sick kids can eat up your annual leave quickly, especially if your company gives fewer days to new employees, so you'll want to have plans in place to handle inevitable kid illnesses when they arise.
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