'Back on the Career Track' Review
A Guide to Returning to Work
Expert advice on how to relaunch your career after years as a stay-at-home mom.
It may be when your youngest child gets out of diapers, or goes to first grade, or flies off to college, but even the happiest stay-at-home moms most likely will return to work. Someday.
Don’t wait until then to read Back on the Career Track: A Guide for Stay-at-Home Moms Who Want to Return to Work. The book’s most valuable advice is the long view, what to do while you’re happily at home with your children to prepare for the day you pick your career back up, and assurances that it can, indeed, be done.
How successful the stay-at-home mom will be in relaunching her career depends on several factors – how established she was in her career before she left, what type of work she did, how long she was out of the workforce, and most importantly what she did in those years when terrible twos and Tinkertoys threatened to consume her.
In Back on the Career Track (Warner Business Books, June 2007) authors Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin speak to the more than 2 million college-educated stay-at-home moms in the United States and provide step-by-step advice.
However, the book isn’t just a binky and blanket to soothe the anxieties of the full-time mother, nor is it the same old argument that staying home with children is better than working outside the home.
Back on the Career Track gives practical tips on how to write your resume and network, points out pitfalls, and shares testimony from women in all situations.
Realistically, the authors claim, you have to prepare for a post-baby career relaunch well before you dust off the briefcase and dig through your closet for your pumps. In fact, the epilogue, “The Future,” gives five pieces of advice for women starting out in their careers (including Acquire Transferable Skills and Don’t Wait Too Long to Have Children).
Perhaps one reason the book is so relatable is the authors’ backgrounds. Cohen, a former investment banker with four children, was a housewife for years before “troubling questions” started to gnaw at her. “Why, despite my education and experience, was I in the same place as women of a generation before me?”
Steir is a Harvard Business School graduate and mother of five, who stayed home full-time for seven years before easing back into work.
Back on the Career Track is comprehensive in the variety of work situations to consider (freelance, work-at-home, part-time, job-sharing, consulting) and is impressively up-to-date in what’s new in today’s work environments.
The book deals directly with a mom’s fears – the biggest one being lack of confidence – in a language its audience understands. In its Job Building Block exercise to determine what skills you have and how they can be applied in a new job market, the authors suggest “Think LEGOs.”
Much of the book deals with the decision to return to work, giving adequate weight to that gut-wrencher. It lists seven major motivators for a return - from money to serving as a role model to your children - and it includes a three-page relaunch readiness quiz.
The book talks about “the aha moment” and adds some humor from a former nurse-MBA who was put to shame in a scrapbooking class.
“But sitting there, watching the other women create, I suddenly had this overwhelming reaction. I said it right there. ‘I have to go back to work. (a) I can’t make this album page, and (b) I don’t want to make this album page. I need to go back to work.’”
Back on the Career Track is realistic in its treatment of the number of women who most likely will make concessions and never return to the same level of corporate life. The highly skilled RN in the operating room who becomes a school nurse is well represented here.
