Feature Article: 8 Surefire Tips for Stay-at-Home Parents to Jump Back into a Career
Secondary Feature: A Parent's Choice: Five Tips To Achieve Work-Life Balance
A Quintet of Quick Questions: QuintZine's Q&A with a Career Expert
Quintessential Site: Featured Career Web Site of this Issue
Career Kick! A column by Teena Rose
Latest Additions: What's New on Quintessential Careers
Q TIPS: Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search
Notes from the Editor: About this Issue...
We've positioned this issue between Mother's Day and Father's Day because its focus is on easing
the transition back into the workforce for parents who have been staying at home with their children.
New contributor Sharon Reed Abboud writes about re-entering the workforce after a period of stay-at-home
parenting. Kelly Watson tells how parents can strike a work-life balance. And in our Q&A interview
with Nancy Collamer, founder of jobsandmoms.com,
Collamer tells what inspired her to found her site and summarizes her advice for working parents.
The Quint Careers RV is hitting the road again! The
Quint RV will be on tour the entire month of June, traveling through Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, New
Mexico, California, Utah, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia.
Contact me (kathy@quintcareers.com) if you'd like to
know more and see us on tour. We'd love to meet some of the 1.3 million unique visitors who helped us set a record for
site visitation this past March.
--Katharine Hansen, Master Resume Writer, Credentialed Career Master,
Certified Electronic Career Coach, and editor at
kathy@quintcareers.com
Feature Article: Tips for Returning to Work
8 Surefire Tips for Stay-at-Home Parents to Jump Back into a Career
by Sharon Reed Abboud
Transitioning back to work can be difficult for long time stay-at-home parents. Often transitioning career-seekers
have lost touch with their professional network. They send their resume in response to job ads and usually end up without a job
or with a job that is below their professional level. There is a better way.
Job-seekers who have been home for three, five, or even 10 years or more can ease into a professional job if they strategize their job search
carefully. By considering the eight factors win our full article
-- with advice from some of America's career experts -- most transitioning career-seekers should be able to jump
right back into the professional work force.
Secondary Feature: Tips for Work-Life Balance
A Parent’s Choice: Five Tips To Achieve Work-Life Balance
by Kelly Watson
Most women struggle with their ability to achieve balance … especially moms who are consistently juggling
responsibilities to meet the needs of many constituents – husbands, children, ailing parents, kid’s schools,
church and volunteer commitments and even employers. Work-life balance all starts with feeling confident
about the choice you make regarding career and raising your children.
Parents can choose among three different paths:
Choosing to continue a powerful career without interruption;
Choosing to step off from a good career to be a full-time mom; or
Choosing to find some hybrid solution to address being caught between wanting
meaningful work and desiring to experience their children’s days firsthand.
While the choices of continuing the career or stepping off are usually consciously made, the nebulous
hybrid solution is often a product of actually failing to choose. The key to becoming balanced is to first
make your choice intentionally. Women who are torn between two worlds and feeling they have little or
no control over their lives – both at work and at home – are most often operating without a key ingredient …
a life plan.
Nancy Collamer, career consultant and founder of Jobsandmoms.com.
In our Q&A interview with her, "jobs and moms" expert Nancy Collamer encapsulates her advice to parents
returning to the workforce with these three tips:
1. Plan for success: By taking courses, improving your skills
through challenging volunteer assignments or building your
marketability through a portfolio of project work, your odds
of a successful re-entry job search are strong.
2. Know your value: The way you position yourself in the marketplace
will be critical to the way you are perceived and compensated.
Aim for jobs that are a suitable fit for your skills and
background. Being able to negotiate from a position of value, instead of from
a place of need, will help you land the best job possible.
3. Trust your strengths: If you believe in yourself and can articulate
your strengths, that confidence will serve you very well during
this process. Apply for jobs that you believe you can do, prepare
a convincing presentation and then go after those jobs with
confidence and conviction.
Collamer also discusses ways to find your career passion, overcoming discrimination, and how to find job leads.
Read our full Q&A interview with her.
This site is for full-time working professional, women who have taken a few years away from the workplace,
and organizations looking for high-quality professional-level talent.
Career coach Nancy Collamer, the subject of our Q&A interview, founded the site as a result
of her telephone counseling work and the experience she gained advising millions of women online as the
"Jobs and Moms Pro" for Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen Media.
The site has helped hundreds of women to create more fulfilling and family-friendly career paths.
Are you thinking about engaging the services of a professional writer for your resume, CV, cover letter,
thank-you letter, or other career-marketing correspondence? Before you take this step,
consider how a professional resume writer could benefit you.
CareersInAudit (CIA) --
a job site for auditors in Europe, where job-seekers can search job listings (by job type, keyword, location,
language, industry), as well as post your CV and profile, register for a job alert system, track your applications, and find
a recruiter. No cost to job-seekers.
Earthworks-jobs.com --
a great job site for all things environmental, including jobs in oil, energy, mining, geoscience, seismology,
earth science, environmental science, agriculture, forestry, ecology, plant science, meteorology, oceanography, geography,
hydrology, soil science, GIS, geomatics, renewable energy, and related subjects. Job-seekers can browse or search
(by keywords) job listings as well as post your resume. No cost to job-seekers.
JobSimply --
a job site offering job listings that include part time jobs and hourly jobs in retail jobs,
hospitality jobs, restaurant jobs, teen jobs, part-time jobs, seasonal jobs, cruise ship jobs and summer jobs.
Job-seekers can search by industry, location, and keywords. Includes a nice collection of career tips. No cost to job-seekers.
odinJobs.com --
a meta-jobsite for IT professionals featuring the largest collection of
IT job postings -- collected from thousands of other job and employer site.
Job-seekers can search for jobs by skill(s) and location. No cost to job-seekers.
Find even more career and job site additions to Quintessential Careers by visiting our
Latest Additions section.
CAREER KICK!
Employers Go Extra Mile for Mothers
A column by Teena Rose
Guilt is one of the biggest side effects working mothers have to deal with, so it's certainly nice when a company
comes along that goes the extra mile to support them.
Roughly 77 percent of women with school-age children (6-17) work, according to government statistics, while 67 percent with
children under 6 years old are employed. Therefore, finding a mother-friendly environment is crucial for many working women.
Working Mother magazine puts out the quintessential list every year of the 100 best companies for working women. These employers
stand out in many ways, but the No. 1 benefit working mothers look for is flexibility. Since companies realize they'll either lose or won't
attract qualified female employees without providing customized schedules, a growing number are thinking creatively to meet the demands.
Q TIPS: Quick and Quintessential Career & Job Tips
The perception of women in the workforce generates significant controversy, and although it has improved over time,
acceptance of the female executive may not be as widespread as most men attest. This finding was recently reported by
co-authored by Baylor University's Dawn S. Carlson and K. Michele Kacmar of the University of Alabama in "What
Men Think About Executive Women" in Harvard Business Review.
In 1965 a survey of 2,000 executives, half men and half women, was taken to find the male and female attitude toward executive
women. The survey was representative of the executive population in the United States and was performed again in 1985. In 2005
the same survey was given to 286 executives and analyzed once more.
According to the survey, men's attitudes about executive women have increased to the point where they are equally favorable when
compared to women's responses. Similarly, the attitude of men toward working for executive women has soared over the past
40 years to now be relatively equal to that of women.
Where differences begin to emerge in attitudes is with the belief that the business community will never fully accept female executives.
Women today have less faith than men that they will be accepted in executive roles. Females also feel more strongly that they
must be exceptional to succeed.
In general, supportive attitudes of women as executives have increased significantly since 1965. But the present research
found that men tend not to acknowledge that females still face barriers for success-even though women say they still encounter
them. Since women hold fewer than 20 percent of corporate officer positions in Fortune 500 companies, and only eight of those companies
have female CEOs, the authors conclude that, "on the likelihood of full acceptance and the necessity of exceptional performance... men's perceptions
are overly rosy."
Myth #1: Motherhood will make it more difficult to get to the top.
Reality: Organizations are recognizing that the qualities of maternal
leadership-perspective, balance, nurturing, and so on-are exactly the skills needed to manage a diverse workforce in turbulent times.
Myth #2: Mothers are opting out at alarming rates.
Reality: Interviews suggest that fast-track women executives with kids are less likely to opt out than women who have lower-level jobs.
It stands to reason that most women with highly successful careers have more to lose by opting out than other women, that the financial
rewards and satisfaction they derive from their jobs are greater than if they had been less successful. Therefore, while a woman in a
dead-end job who has a child might find it easy to stop working, a woman in an exciting, fulfilling executive role will find such a
prospect less enticing.
Myth #3: To become a CEO, you must carefully plan your career and life around your goal.
Reality: While you need to get the right mix of academic and job
experiences to be even considered for a CEO position, you cannot plan every aspect of your life to the point that you significantly increase
the odds of becoming a CEO.
Myth #4: Women who have to leave work because of family
problems become bitter and resentful.
Reality: When high-achieving mothers stop working, they usually do so because they have decided they prefer to be
at home rather than at work.
Myth #5: If I do take a break, I cannot get back on the fast track.
Reality: You must battle to stay on the fast track no matter what your situation might be.
Many moms wish they could have more quality time with their families. One-in-four working moms (25 percent)
say they are dissatisfied with their work/life balance, according to a CareerBuilder.com survey of 1,124 women, employed full-time,
with children under the age of 18 living at home. Forty-four percent say they would take a pay cut if it meant they could spend more time
with their kids and nearly one- in-ten (9 percent) say they would give up 10 percent or more of their salary. Of working moms who are not
the sole financial provider, nearly half (49 percent) say they would leave their job if their spouse or significant other made enough
money for the family to live comfortably.
If your school, organization, business or other
entity has a Web site, we welcome you to link to Quintessential Careers.
If you already have a link from your site, we want you to know we
appreciate it. If you don't have a link to us, please
send a request to your site's Webmaster to establish a
link to Quintessential Careers. Thanks so much!
For more details (including sample HTML copy), see our
Link to Us page.
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QuintZine: Topics in Upcoming Issues
WATCH FOR feature articles on these topics in upcoming
issues of QuintZine:
* Office Politics
* Gossiping at the Office
* Defending Yourself at Work
* How to Transition Back to Work: A Guide for Stay-at-Home Parents
* Women as Breadwinners
* Maternity Leave
* 10 Job-Hunting Mistakes to Avoid
* Your Job Search IQ
* Jobs on the Cutting Edge
* Should You Make a Lateral Career Move?
* Volunteer Your Way into a New Job
* First Impressions Quiz
* Be Ready for an Unexpected Job Interview
* Your Blog as a Resume?
* Font Facts: Resume Typography
* Resume Bullet Points: Before and After
* Social/Online Networking from the Recruiter's Perspective
* Salary Negotiation Mistakes to Avoid
* Use Your Resume to Negotiate a Higher Salary
* GLBT Job-search Issues
* The Value of Internships Abroad and Study Abroad
* Top 10 Fears of Job-seekers
* For Job-hunting Success, Develop a Detailed Job-Search Plan
* Keep Your Career Dreams Alive
* MBA Career Portfolios
* Pre-Hire Background/Credit Checks
* Financial Aid/Scholarship Timetable
* Build Confidence and Avoid Insecurity in Job Interviews
* Empty Nest Job-seekers
* Are You Sabotaging Your Job-Search/Career?
* Lifelong Networking
* Networking for the Shy
* Working Night Shifts/Odd Hours
* Quintessential Career Profiles of YOU, our readers
* Q&As with well-known career experts
* Book reviews
. . . and much, much more...
