Leadership Spotlight

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Making a Career Comeback

For those who lacked the foresight to keep their networks active during work hiatuses, programs like Wharton’s Career Comeback are a valuable resource.

Career Comeback, which will be offered for second time in the spring of 2008, is a highly selective program designed for women with graduate degrees and a minimum of five years of professional experience. Most participants have taken a career hiatus of between two and seven years. While programs with similar goals have been offered by Tuck and Harvard Business School, the Wharton program is the first to be provided to participants at no charge, thanks to financial sponsorship from UBS.

To prepare for the reentry process, participants update critical business knowledge, with a focus on finance, marketing, and strategy, receive career coaching to hone their skills, create transition strategies and action plans for reentry into the workforce, receive one-on-one career coaching, and benefit from faculty research and corporate perspectives.

For Tina Wallace, the program inspired her to become an advocate for women in similar career transitions. While she originally returned to her marketing career after her first child was born, a few years later she and her husband relocated from Los Angeles to Virginia. The Wallaces were ready to add another baby to the family, so for Tina Wallace, taking time off from paid employment made sense. Eventually she became the mother of three.

“I thought when my youngest was in first grade I’d go back to work,” she says. “Now my youngest is in fifth grade, and I’m finally ready.” In the ensuing years, she had been busy with high-level volunteer work as well as parenting, but her professional network — a continent away — had gone entirely dormant.

Her first step to revive it was joining the Wharton Club of Washington, DC.

“It’s been amazing,” she says. “I entered an established network.” She has also helped shape the club’s agenda to include more resources for alumnae in similar situations. She launched a Career Transitions luncheon group, organized a women’s speaker event, and founded a women’s interest group that allows non-Wharton members to join. She has authored articles, promoted events, and spoken at the last two Joseph Wharton annual dinners.

“When I first joined the club, I felt very green,” she says. “I felt as if everyone knew each other but me. But I’ve found that every volunteer organization is looking for people who are energetic, have ideas, and will take the ball and run with it.”

Wallace heard about the Career Comeback program while attending a Wharton Alumni Leadership Conference. For her the program was another catalyst, one that has helped her translate the skills that she had acquired as a volunteer leader into marketable skills in the workplace.

“Networking takes strength,” she adds. “I spoke with a woman who had been a mentor to me earlier in my career, and she was lovely. I wish I had kept in closer touch all along, but you can’t be shy. Anyone you’re calling would call you if they were in the same situation.”

Wallace is being flexible in her job search, a must for workers seeking reentry. Despite her long resume in financial services, she is also pursuing the greater opportunities in technology that Northern Virginia has to offer.

Her experience tracks closely with the results discovered by McGrath and her colleagues, who found that participants entered into their new job searches with realistic expectations.

However, as the job search continued, many survey participants began to suffer self-doubt, which can spiral, says McGrath. “When they meet resistance, they are taken aback. They are not prepared for it, and they lose confidence.”

Judith Stockmon, WG’94, another Career Comeback alumna, found that increased confidence was one of the biggest values of the Executive Education program. “I have a lot more to sell than I realized,” she says. “I’m finding that when employers aren’t interested in me, it may be that the skill set isn’t a match, but I haven’t gotten negative feedback about time taken away from the workplace.

Stockmon exited full-time work in 2001 after the birth of her first daughter. She left behind her New York-based career as director of marketing communications for the SciFi Channel and Showtime Networks. While pregnant with her second daughter, she relocated with her family to Washington, DC, for her husband’s career. She had intended both the move and the career hiatus to be temporary. Both lasted longer than she anticipated.

Stockmon has stayed active as a fiction and freelance marketing writer, but she is ready to more fully restart her career after six years away from the office.

“I don’t know a woman who has stepped out and who has pursued hefty educational attainments who isn’t interested in making a contribution to society outside the home,” she says. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t still feel the urge to achieve — it doesn’t go away. It may go dormant for a while, but at some point, it will roar.”

She still experiences some compunctions about the decision. “When you’re sitting on one side of the fence, it looks really great over there,” she says. “But the workplace wasn’t meeting my needs, and it became too difficult to manage both sides. I’m not 100% sure that I want to go back to a full corporate press, but I am 100% sure that I want to resurrect my career.”

Growing Movement Towards Flexibility

The ideal position for Stockmon would be meaningful, remunerative flex-time work — once a rarity but now becoming more common.

Lisa Yom, W’00, is the co-founder of Ivy Exec, a New York-based online job site that posts full-time and flexible jobs specifically for high-caliber professionals with graduate degrees from top universities or the equivalent experience.

“For some, seeking flexible work arrangements may arise from caregiving — taking care of elderly parents or young children,” says Yom. “However, we find that many individuals, regardless of gender, are increasingly seeking greater work-life balance, and that flexibility is enabling this.” She cites a 2006 Universum Study that showed for the first time that male MBAs joined their female counterparts by ranking work-life balance as their top career goal. The perception that flexibility is only a women’s issue is out of date and quickly eroding with changing work cultures.

Says Yom, “Some employers are trying to overcome a perceived stigma on flexible work schedules by redefining these arrangements as a gender-neutral issue. The approach is gaining momentum, especially in the male-dominated financial- services sector where ‘extreme jobs’ with marathon work weeks are commonplace.”

In addition to Wharton’s Career Comeback partner, UBS, leaders include Ernst & Young, which offers 13 types of flexible work arrangements, and Lehman Brothers, which runs an Encore program to recruit experienced female workers back to workplace after hiatuses.