by Carol Fishman Cohen
Kathy Bayert has an MBA from
Northwestern’s Kellogg School and a résumé that includes stints at IBM
and PricewaterhouseCoopers. In 2003 she put her career on hold to stay
home with her two children. Five years later, looking to return to work
at age 42, she found that the gap on her résumé was the least of her
problems: The economy was plummeting into recession. While scouring
online job boards one day, she encountered an unfamiliar term: Sara Lee
was advertising a “returnship.” It turned out that the opening was a
short-term paid position designed for a professional who’d been out of
the workforce for several years—basically, an internship for an
experienced worker whose time off might scare recruiters away. Bayert
applied, was accepted, and signed on. After her initial six-month
assignment, she was hired as a senior manager of organizational
effectiveness. The program, she says, was “critical as a springboard
back into the workforce.”
The challenge of relaunching a career after a hiatus (most often for full-time parenting) is not new, of course. Women (and some men) have been dealing with it for decades, and the economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett has explored it in a series of groundbreaking HBR articles and books. Still, it remains a hot-button issue: It’s an important part of the dilemma that Anne-Marie Slaughter laid out in her widely discussed essay in the July/August 2012 Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Amid all the debate, however, some innovative organizations have been quietly experimenting with an option that may be part of the solution. “Returnships” (a term trademarked in 2008 by Goldman Sachs) help create what Hewlett calls “on-ramps” for people seeking to return to work. These short-term, nonbinding arrangements can be a valuable way to reduce the risks (real or perceived) of hiring people who’ve chosen to take an extended break.
Given the weak global labor market, this may seem a strange time for employers to be expanding their pipeline of prospective employees. But that view misses an important point. Even though unemployment is high, companies struggle to find the right applicants. The potential candidates for returnship programs are a high-caliber bunch. During the four years I’ve spent running return-to-work conferences, all the attendees have held bachelor’s degrees, 75% have held graduate degrees, and 75% had worked for at least 10 years before taking an intentional break. Returning professionals offer enlightened employers a rare opportunity: They allow them to hire people who have a level of maturity and experience not found in younger recruits and who are at a life stage where parental leaves and spousal job relocations are most likely behind them. In short, these applicants are an excellent investment. Using a returnship program as a screening tool lets employers skim the top talent from this pool and then make ultimate hiring decisions on the basis of meaningful work samples.
One of the oldest return-to-work programs is the UK’s Daphne Jackson Memorial Fellowships Trust, which began in 1985. It offers flexible part-time paid research positions at universities and companies to UK residents with an academic degree in science, engineering, or technology and with at least three years of related work experience. To be eligible, applicants must have been out of the workforce for a minimum of two years. (Most organizations have a similar requirement, which generally makes returnships unavailable to people who’ve been recently laid off or are job-hunting while employed.) Fully 96% of fellows find a regular position at the end of the two-year program. Although most of the 200-plus alumni are women, there are exceptions: In 2003 Sami Kafala, a nuclear physicist who had been the primary caregiver for his children for five years, became the first male Daphne Jackson fellow. Today he works as an analytical physicist doing environmental radioactivity research at Imperial College London—a position he connected with during his fellowship.
How can employers set up successful returnships? Having studied programs at 14 organizations (several of which, including Goldman Sachs, Sara Lee, and Pace Law School, have sponsored conferences held by my company) and interviewed program directors and dozens of participants, I offer seven recommendations.
Keep it small. Returnships are a new enough concept that even the companies that pioneered the practice keep them small; it’s easier to get buy-in and to build a successful track record that way. Goldman Sachs, which created 11 eight-week stints for IT and back-office professionals in 2008, the first year of its returnship program, more than tripled that number in 2010 but dropped back to 16 the following year in order to ensure high-quality, high-touch support. About half the participants have gone on to regular positions at the firm.
Identify an internal champion (or two). Returning-professional programs typically thrive only if they have a strong advocate, whether that person is an HR executive or, as at Sara Lee, the CEO. (When that company initiated its returnship program, the chief executive was Brenda Barnes, who had taken time off for child-rearing herself.) Cultivating multiple supporters can be crucial to a program’s long-term survival; if the sole champion leaves, the program may falter (as Sara Lee’s did after Barnes departed in 2010).
Model the returnship on your existing internship program. There’s no need to start from scratch. Many companies already have well-developed programs for college-age interns. The work assigned to returning professionals should be more challenging, but many other elements—the application process, the orientation, the duration, and mentorship arrangements—can be similar or even shared.
Source:hbr.com
The challenge of relaunching a career after a hiatus (most often for full-time parenting) is not new, of course. Women (and some men) have been dealing with it for decades, and the economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett has explored it in a series of groundbreaking HBR articles and books. Still, it remains a hot-button issue: It’s an important part of the dilemma that Anne-Marie Slaughter laid out in her widely discussed essay in the July/August 2012 Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Amid all the debate, however, some innovative organizations have been quietly experimenting with an option that may be part of the solution. “Returnships” (a term trademarked in 2008 by Goldman Sachs) help create what Hewlett calls “on-ramps” for people seeking to return to work. These short-term, nonbinding arrangements can be a valuable way to reduce the risks (real or perceived) of hiring people who’ve chosen to take an extended break.
Given the weak global labor market, this may seem a strange time for employers to be expanding their pipeline of prospective employees. But that view misses an important point. Even though unemployment is high, companies struggle to find the right applicants. The potential candidates for returnship programs are a high-caliber bunch. During the four years I’ve spent running return-to-work conferences, all the attendees have held bachelor’s degrees, 75% have held graduate degrees, and 75% had worked for at least 10 years before taking an intentional break. Returning professionals offer enlightened employers a rare opportunity: They allow them to hire people who have a level of maturity and experience not found in younger recruits and who are at a life stage where parental leaves and spousal job relocations are most likely behind them. In short, these applicants are an excellent investment. Using a returnship program as a screening tool lets employers skim the top talent from this pool and then make ultimate hiring decisions on the basis of meaningful work samples.
One of the oldest return-to-work programs is the UK’s Daphne Jackson Memorial Fellowships Trust, which began in 1985. It offers flexible part-time paid research positions at universities and companies to UK residents with an academic degree in science, engineering, or technology and with at least three years of related work experience. To be eligible, applicants must have been out of the workforce for a minimum of two years. (Most organizations have a similar requirement, which generally makes returnships unavailable to people who’ve been recently laid off or are job-hunting while employed.) Fully 96% of fellows find a regular position at the end of the two-year program. Although most of the 200-plus alumni are women, there are exceptions: In 2003 Sami Kafala, a nuclear physicist who had been the primary caregiver for his children for five years, became the first male Daphne Jackson fellow. Today he works as an analytical physicist doing environmental radioactivity research at Imperial College London—a position he connected with during his fellowship.
How can employers set up successful returnships? Having studied programs at 14 organizations (several of which, including Goldman Sachs, Sara Lee, and Pace Law School, have sponsored conferences held by my company) and interviewed program directors and dozens of participants, I offer seven recommendations.
Keep it small. Returnships are a new enough concept that even the companies that pioneered the practice keep them small; it’s easier to get buy-in and to build a successful track record that way. Goldman Sachs, which created 11 eight-week stints for IT and back-office professionals in 2008, the first year of its returnship program, more than tripled that number in 2010 but dropped back to 16 the following year in order to ensure high-quality, high-touch support. About half the participants have gone on to regular positions at the firm.
Identify an internal champion (or two). Returning-professional programs typically thrive only if they have a strong advocate, whether that person is an HR executive or, as at Sara Lee, the CEO. (When that company initiated its returnship program, the chief executive was Brenda Barnes, who had taken time off for child-rearing herself.) Cultivating multiple supporters can be crucial to a program’s long-term survival; if the sole champion leaves, the program may falter (as Sara Lee’s did after Barnes departed in 2010).
Model the returnship on your existing internship program. There’s no need to start from scratch. Many companies already have well-developed programs for college-age interns. The work assigned to returning professionals should be more challenging, but many other elements—the application process, the orientation, the duration, and mentorship arrangements—can be similar or even shared.
Source:hbr.com
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