How do you recover from a career break?

People in recent times have realized the importance of maintaining a work-life balance. Work and personal life often invade each other and maintaining boundaries between the two are not as simple as it seems. 

Taking a timeout from employment for a few years isn’t as bad as society makes you feel so. It is surely scary but worth it as you get to see a world other than your work. You get time to refresh and upskill yourself for a better opportunity to come your way. Career breaks are pretty helpful for those who wish to change their career paths. 

Many people choose to take a career break in order to either develop themselves professionally or personally. Most people restart their careers within six to two years of their career break. If they come back within a month or less it would be considered a mini-break. A career break of a month or two while you were actively applying for new roles is understandable and most hiring managers understand that when they look at your resumes. 

What are the reasons one might go for a career break?

• Learning a new skill
• Focusing on growing your passion
• Get Perspective
• Look after your mental health
• Explore a new career

What is the stigma behind taking a career break?

The biggest stigma lies in taking a career break is financial security. You don’t work there anymore, there’s no recurring revenue. Many people still believe that it will give a bad impression to the recruiter when they apply for their next job. 

Let’s break this myth and tell you how you can go about the situation. 

Well, it’s common for a recruiter to question these breaks. But what they are most interested in is to knowing what you did during that break rather than eliminating you from their shortlist. 

It looks authentic when you mention your career break in your CV as it shows that you were confident with your decision and don't regret it as many people after taking a career break start missing their job. 

• You can mention within 1-2 lines in your resume not more than that. 
• The best is to speak about it in your cover letter as it has much more space to talk about it and show what you have done during that period of your career break. 

Here are a few things you can do when a recruiter asks you in a job interview-

• Being Honest
• Make a skill centric resume
• Share things that you’re comfortable talking about
• Talk about your references in previous jobs
• Talk about your transferable skills and how you can use them for the desired role. 

How to get back after a career break?

The key to restarting after a career break is to efficiently utilize it. Here are some ways in which you can do so-

• A career gap is the best time to develop new skills or work on your long-lost passion. This is the best time to explore and try out a lot of stuff rather than cribbing over the fact that you left your well-paying job. 
• The best part about it is that you get to know a lot about yourself when you try out things. You tend to become more self-aware. You get time to focus on the things that truly matter. 
• You can do your opportunity research. You can study a new career path and plan it extensively. You can take up part time jobs projects related to your domain and see if you enjoy working on them or not. 

You can spend time networking and connecting with the right people. You can focus on building meaningful relationships that can help you ahead in your career after this break. You can do that by helping other people in order to get help in the future.