Back On The Career Track

In your daily work and home life, if you find you need services, consider supporting Relauncher owned businesses that provide those services.

For example, when we needed a website designer we chose Betsy Blagdon at www.glissadedesign.com. Not only does she have a reasonably priced excellent product, but she's a relauncher! An MIT trained engineer, she runs this web design business from her home while she does other important work such as serving as her elementary school's PTO Co-President! (Wow, when I was PTO President of my kid's school there was no way I could have also run a business on the side; I'm impressed!)

When we needed a logo design for our associated career break connections business, iRelaunch, we decided that rather than hire a traditional graphic design company, we wanted a relauncher! So we hired Marcy Tivol, an award winning graphic designer who is now at home with her young baby doing freelance work. She totally gets our product because she is our market.

And when we needed business cards, we went to www.mommybiz.net as I mentioned in the previous post, run, of course, by relauncher Elaine Milnes.

On the personal side, when I was trying to figure out summer plans for my kids, I purchased TeenLife Boston’s invaluable guide to summer activities for teens created by relauncher Marie Schwartz. Check it out at www.teenlifeboston.com.

We want to start a listing of relauncher owned businesses all over the country so moms can tap into the wealth of great products and services offered, and also support relauncher moms in the process! One caveat....we will not screen for quality control and we can't test every product and service, so please understand that at the outset. Our motivation here is to develop this side of our relauncher community. Our longer term goal would be to add a review function for consumers, but one thing at a time!!

Please send your relauncher owned business information to info@backonthecareertrack.com and we will make sure it gets included on our site. Please include a short description of your product and service and a brief history of what you used to do, why you started the business and anything else you would like us to know about you. Try to keep it brief so we can reprint some of it along with your website or other contact info.

In the past couple of months we have run into Carol Frohlinger, co-author of Her Place at the Table, and Co-Founder and Managing Director of Negotiating Women, Inc at three separate conferences. Carol is a negotiating expert. She put together a set of negotiating tips for relaunchers, pasted below. We are reprinting them below and will add them to our resources section shortly. In the meantime, Carol generously offered a 20% discount on Negotiating Women's e-courses.
Check them out!!

5 Tips to Negotiating the “On-Ramp”

• Get out of your own way. We have learned from our research that sometimes women are their own worst enemy in negotiation. For example, many women have a tendency to focus on their weakness—“I’ve been out of the workforce for a long time; I’ll have to take at least a few steps back.” Watch out for self-defeating behaviors that will undermine your ability to negotiate the best possible situation.
• Know what you want. You can’t be an effective negotiator if you are not clear about your interests. Think big; you may not get everything you want but at least you are starting your preparation in the right frame of mind.
• Do your homework. Figure out ways to translate the skills you have honed during your time out of the workplace into marketable business skills. If you have any gaps, for example, if you’ve not kept up with technology, start to close them. Then you can present a solid case, confident that you are marketable and that you have the ammunition to convince interviewers.
• Expect challenges. Everyone wants an edge in a negotiation. Challenges are intended to put you on the defensive—and keep you there. They are also predictable. Anticipate how the other person is liable to react and think of specific ways to respond. Practice out loud.
• Engage the other person. The best negotiations are exercises in two-way communication. Needs exist on both sides of the table. Perspectives, feelings, and ideas differ. By showing appreciation for these differences, you put the other person more at ease in talking about them. As shared understanding increases, you stop pulling against each other and start working together toward a mutual solution.

What is Negotiating Women?

Negotiating Women, Inc. offers the only e-learning courses on negotiation (online or CD ROM) designed especially for women. And yes, there are some special negotiation challenges women face that are unlikely to affect men.

Based on award–winning research, our interactive, case-based courses are fun to use and available to busy women when it is convenient for them. Our customers say that a small investment of time greatly enhances their ability to negotiate confidently and competently.

• Getting Out of Your Own Way — a short course on the common traps that often befall women when they negotiate and how to avoid them
• Getting The Salary You Want—a crash course in salary negotiation, designed for those taking a new position
• Getting What You’re Worth — a comprehensive guide designed to support women as they proactively manage their careers (hint, it’s about more than money, although money counts)

If you decide to take one of our courses, enter the coupon code: “Act 2” for a 20% discount!

www.negotiatingwomen.com

OK I have to say I did a double take when I read this headline. It turns out Victoria Young from Investor Daily was writing about a Sydney based “female focused” consulting firm reorganizing.

You may have wondered where we have been over the last few months and why there have been no “tips, news and advice” entries during this period. The reason? We’ve put all our time into the launch of iRelaunch www.iRelaunch.com. iRelaunch is our new career break connections company, connecting mid-career professionals in all stages of career break with each other, with resources for updating them, with strategic volunteering opportunities, and ultimately, with employers. In addition, iRelaunch creates career reentry programming, strategy and recruitment solutions for employers, organizations and universities.

iRelaunch screened candidates for Lehman Brothers Encore program, for ex-finance professionals looking to return to a career in financial services. We worked closely with the Bentley College More Opportunities for Mom, Metlife Investments Take 2, and the Baruch College Zicklin School of Management Opting Back In career reentry programs. We have also been speaking all over the place, from the New York City Bar Association career reentry event, to Junior League, to the Newton Mother’s Forum, to local Jewish Community Centers. See our speaking schedule on www.backonthecareertrack.com under “Speaking” to see where we’re headed this winter and spring.

So lots going on. If Superwoman does decide to relaunch, we’re signing her up for iRelaunch. --Carol

We received lots of questions from The Southern Marin Mother's Club in Northern California. We'll highlight specific questions and our answers to share with you in the coming weeks:

Here's the first: "What should you and should you not talk about in an interview when going back? (I.e., should we not mention that we had to manage ALL household duties with a traveling husband? How about house remodeling? Volunteer work?)"

Although managing a household with children without a husband’s involvement requires a lot of skills, this won’t be a great selling point in your interviews. First of all, if you’re conversing with a working mother, she may well have been managing the same load AND have held down a job at the same time, so she may be either unimpressed or jealous. And if you’re interviewing with a man, he may be skeptical that you’ll be able to handle all those household tasks AND a job, especially if he has a stay-at-home wife. So, bottom line, don’t spend time talking about your role as CEO of the home. Ditto for managing a remodeling.

Substantive volunteer work, however, is another matter. Absolutely talk about what you did as head of the PTO or any other major pro bono role. But describe your volunteer accomplishments, both on your resume and in interviews, in business terms. For example, “I managed a 10-person team inorganizing a carnival that raised 30% more money than in prior years.” Then describe the innovations that made your campaign so successful. A number of the women we interviewed for Back on the Career Track reported that their accomplishments as a volunteer were meaningful to the employers who hired them.

We have submitted three OpEd pieces over the last year and a half to national newspapers and have been fortunate enough to get two of them published (our OpEd on Sandra Day O'Connor's five years as a stay-at-home mom was published by the Boston Globe and
our OpEd rebuttal to Leslie Bennetts' The Feminine Mistake was published by the Christian Science Monitor ). But our OpEd on Annette Bening, who has relaunched, not one, but two times to even greater career success in a career in which age and breaks can often be devastating, was not picked up by any of the major papers. We submitted it right before this year's Oscars in March. We really admire Annette Bening and the example she has set for relaunchers, so we thought we'd run our piece here in our blog for all to see.....Let us know what you think.

And the Winner is…Annette Bening
By Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin

Although it’s almost time for “the envelope please,” we’re still lamenting the lack of an Oscar nomination for Annette Bening. Not because her performance in “Running with Scissors” deserved it (though it did), but because being nominated for and, ideally, winning the Oscar would have capped a stunning second comeback by this immensely talented former stay-at-home mom. Yes, the Oscarless Bening is a winner for a whole different reason: two times during her career she took three-year breaks to be home with her kids, and she defied the odds by driving her career to new heights each time she returned.

There’s always been something distinctly non-Hollywood about Bening. Born in Topeka Kansas , she started her career in theater and didn’t make her first film until 1988 at the age of 30. It didn’t take her long to triumph in this new medium, however. She nabbed an Oscar nomination for “The Grifters” in 1990, then starred in three more films, including “Bugsy,” nabbing a husband (what a husband!), in the process.

Although the wags probably thought she was committing career suicide by dropping out just as she was starting to make it, that’s exactly what Bening did. Her first leave of absence from Hollywood occurred from1991 to1994, when she married Warren Beatty and bore their first child. Eschewing conventional wisdom regarding actresses’ shelf-lives, she stayed home for three years while her first two children were little. But then she bucked conventional wisdom again by going back to work, relaunching her career with a vengeance. Between 1995 and 1999, she made seven films (and had a third child), racking up a second Oscar nomination for her performance in “American Beauty.”

As if one extended leave from Hollywood and one spectacular comeback were not enough, Bening did it again, following the birth of her fourth child in 2000. She opted out for three years, then reappeared in “ Open Range ” in 2003. But it was her performance in "Being Julia" in 2004 that truly relaunched her career, as well as earned her a Golden Globe and yet another Oscar nomination. Further cementing her reputation as “Not a Has Been,” Bening has accumulated five major nominations since, including this year’s Golden Globe and Screen Actor’s Guild nominations for “Running with Scissors.”

Although “opting-out” of careers to stay home with kids still grabs headlines, a full three and a half years after Lisa Belkin’s watershed New York Times Magazine article on the topic, the media and, more importantly, employers, are finally beginning to realize that women who take career breaks don’t necessarily want to remain stay-at-home moms forever, and shouldn’t feel they have to. In fact, women are successfully relaunching their careers in every field. It’s just that, unfortunately, no one is documenting these relaunch success stories. Once a woman is back on the career track, people tend to forget she ever left. And that’s precisely the point. Employers need to realize that if a woman performed well in the past, there’s a high likelihood that she’ll do so again. Indeed, given her maturity and perspective, a former stay-at-home mom’s career trajectory may well turn stratospheric. Like Annette Bening’s.

Clearly, Bening represents an exceptional relaunch success story. But there are lessons here for those who doubt the ability of stay-at-home moms to get back on the career track successfully once they’ve stepped off. For moms: Adopt an air of confidence. Don’t apologize for your choices. Bening seems to do what she wants to, and what she thinks is right, at every stage of her life. She ignores the naysayers. For employers, get over the resume gap and give stay-at-home moms a chance. You may well end up with a star performer.

The Best Actress statuette may have eluded her once again, but when it comes to the Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in Real Life, Annette Bening’s the clear winner.

We LOVE Laura Zigman’s novel Piece of Work. It’s about a relauncher who returns to her original career as a publicist when her husband loses his job, but this time at a second rate firm working for the client from hell. It’s a great summer read, entertaining and funny. Piece of Work has been optioned by Tom Hanks' production company to be made into a movie starring Nia Vardalos from My Big Fat Greek Wedding! How exciting is that! Laura Zigman also has an entertaining and funny website www.laurazigman.com that you should take a look at. And then you can click on the Piece of Work book cover and order the book from there.

One of the very first things you should do when you are getting ready to network is to get a simple business card. It is much more professional to hand out a business card when exchanging contact information than to write your information on a scrap of paper. It's also less likely to get thrown out. In the spirit of supporting relauncher owned businesses, we'd like to recommend mommybiz.net for your business card needs. Mommybiz founder Elaine Milnes created our business cards and we were quite happy with the results. You can do something very simple, or add a logo or even customize your card if you want to convey more than just your contact information. Her web examples show a lot of "mommy" logos, but she can create serious business cards as well. For example, we put a small 4 color reprint of our book cover on our cards. So contact Elaine at www.mommybiz.net and order asap! And one more tip when collecting business cards from others - write on the card a one word reminder of what you were discussing with the person. There's nothing like coming home with a purse full of business cards and no idea what you talked about with whom!