Career break? Reimagine!

Whether a break is a voluntary or a circumstantial one, the difficult journey of making a career comeback is not spoken about enough.

Issac John

The year 2016 was a hard knock of a year for me. Little did I know that my little adventure of taking a six-month sabbatical to learn to screenwrite would land me in the kind of soup I found myself in. I had given myself eight months of financial leeway as I left the role of Head of Marketing at an international firm in August 2015, but by December 2016, I was into my 16th month of zero income.

In January 2017, however, the tide turned and I joined a well-known start-up as their Head of Marketing. A year later, another fantastic opportunity came my way and by January 2021, I was helming a 50-member team that built and launched a major OTT app in India.

In a nutshell, for 16 months, I had nothing of consequence and somehow in the next 16 months, I had everything I had dreamt about.

Looking back, it’s hard to connect the dots about when exactly the tide turned but I do know that my subsequent success had a lot to do with my career break, which was arduous and fulfilling in equal measures. Those 16 months that included all of 2016 were replete with soul-crushing rejections and lows that often made me question my own decision several times.

Whether a break is a voluntary one like mine, or a circumstantial one due to maternity or parental caregiving or termination, the difficult journey of making a career comeback is not spoken about enough. The residual stigma of ‘a gap year in the CV’ adds to the worries of an already distressed individual.

If you’re in the middle of a career break or planning to take one, here’s a short, practical reckoner — bear in mind these as you chart that comeback.

* Accumulate scars of rejection

The hardest thing to do while making a comeback is to put yourself out there again in the job market and stand up to the potential of scores of rejections and questions from multiple quarters. When my dream companies were rejecting my candidature, my world felt like it was falling apart. But the more I put myself out there, the less was the sting of each rejection.

Often, we do not risk rejections in our career enough and we prefer going down the path where we think our odds of succeeding are high. While there’s nothing wrong with that, I have now come to believe that we should also be doing the exact opposite every once in a while. This is perhaps exactly what is required to clear one's mind space.

* Reach out for opportunities that seem impossible but are not improbable

Once you start accumulating the rejections that come your way, two things happen — first, your survival instinct tends to kick in and second, you look for alternate approaches and ways to make things work. Nothing to my mind is more important than this strand of survivalist thinking to professionally grow in your career.

Eventually, the levee will break and those accumulated scars will steel you once and for all for the future.

* Communicate with your closest family members and friends

Rejections aren’t easy to take, but expressing your deepest fears and verbalising them to your near and dear ones, makes it that much easier to wake up in the morning with your fullest energy. There were times when I had closed myself to even some of my thickest circle of friends in fear of ‘What do I talk to them about, when I haven’t made any progress?’

Carrying that emotional burden was unnecessary. We’re somehow taught to appear strong at all times and expressing vulnerability doesn’t come easy to us. But if you make yourself comfortable with the idea of opening up, you’ll realise that you have a group that you can fall back on. Having that emotional anchor goes a long way in helping you be in the right frame of mind. Generally speaking, there’s an imposter syndrome in each of us. Maybe you aren’t giving yourself enough credit for certain things you are already doing well. Friends and family members often help you see that too.

Besides, talking about your failures might just make you see a perspective that you weren’t giving enough attention to. The more you open up and let yourself be vulnerable, especially with your close friends and family, the more you’re likely to realise the rewards of it.

* If you feel everything’s falling apart, seek help from a therapist

There was a dark phase for me where the spate of rejections not just dented my confidence but also made me lethargic enough to not even want to try anymore. I’d feel that the whole journey of my sabbatical had been pointless and that I had lost control of what was till then a fairly well-planned career.

Mornings seemed dreadful and evenings felt like another day was spent in futility. This feeling went on for a couple of months until I realised that something needed to change. I couldn’t control these rejections or the way I felt about them, but I thought that I could at least place my fears and concerns in front of a stranger — a therapist. And thus began a very meaningful chapter of looking out for my own mental being.

The subsequent once-a-week sessions turned out to be the most transformative triggers behind my making a comeback. Once again, seeking help has been positioned to us as a sign of weakness whereas it’s the exact opposite in a situation like this. Asking for help isn’t easy in itself. Seeking help from a counsellor might seem even harder but just that one mindset shift can go a long way.

One last bit on this subject of mental health. If for any reason, the mental health professional you speak with doesn’t work out for you, give it another chance. With therapists and patients, the right match is critical. Like all good things in life, finding the right counsellor itself can take time and you should not hesitate to pull back and look for alternate counsellors if your first (or second or third) counsellor doesn’t feel right for you. Having the right counsellor has worked twice in pulling me back from the abyss of depression in the past 15 years. I am positive it can do you good too.

As unfortunate as some of the recent layoffs have been in some of the most enduring businesses around the world, questions about how to bounce back from unplanned career breaks and destigmatising career breaks are far from resolved even in today’s day and time. Towards this end, organisations themselves have some way to go.

What organisations can do

Having better parental leave policies and select employers now provisioning for different versions of paid and unpaid sabbaticals are all signs of the winds of change that need to blow harder for us to get there. A multinational company recently announced an eight-week paternity leave for would-be fathers. Another interesting development was that LinkedIn announced that a ‘Stay at Home Mom’ is a valid profession that mothers could choose in their profile.

I do, however, believe that organisations can do more. For instance, companies can start looking at sabbaticals as an employee retention tool. As the trend of ‘The Great Resignation’ takes off in companies globally, organisations need to start positioning themselves as being pro-career breaks. A simple way to implement this, is, for instance, to give an employee one month of earned sabbatical for every year of their service to the company. This can be capped at six months (against six years) and the employee would be paid half of their basic pay for these six months.

Retaining an employee, especially at mid-manager and leadership levels, costs much less than hiring and training a new one. A move like this, if normalised, can bring up employee satisfaction scores. All things being equal, with a simple benefit like this, the employer has an opportunity to be seen as a more desirable choice.

Several companies already have similar versions of sabbaticals as part of their employee benefits but these are few and far in between. Adopting these practices in India might need that key push from the startup ecosystem where working cultures are notoriously different and perceived to be harsh. Employees are already used to having their stocks vested over a three or four-year period, so why not vest your sabbatical period with your employer?

The world is too thrilling and exciting a place to only consider a conventional career that works like a stepladder. Lori Goler, now Head of People at Meta, uses a metaphor in Sandberg’s Lean In. She attributes this quote to Pattie Sellers, formerly an award-winning writer with Fortune and now co-CEO of SellersEaston Media: ‘Our careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.’

The essence of this timeless wisdom around careers is that there can be any number of ways to move ahead in a career, and to view it through a lens of simple linear progression is self-limiting.

The time to reimagine career breaks is now.

The writer has led large direct-to-consumer teams spanning marketing, product, design and tech functions, with stellar consumer brands. A big believer in re-shaping careers, he has taken two breaks over the course of his career of 16 years, one of which took him back to school at the New York Film Academy at the age of 33. He is the author of 'Reboot: How To Manage Career Breaks And Return With Greater Success' recently published by HarperCollins.