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The pandemic put 2.3 million women out of the workforce, setting back efforts to close the gender gap by a generation.
Returnships (recruitment and training designed to help people re-enter the workforce after taking time off paid work) are gaining popularity, with companies like Amazon launching high-profile programs. Here’s what you need to know about returnships, and how they can help advance gender equality.
Going back to work after taking time off can be daunting and fraught with difficulties.
How do you explain the gaps in your resume, convince recruiters that you’re still a highly desirable candidate despite having been out of the game for a while, and handle the inevitable impostor syndrome that accompanies a career break?
These are questions that millions of people worldwide are grappling with at the moment. It’s an issue that has far-reaching consequences in our personal lives, and in the pursuit of more diverse workplaces.
What is a Returnship?
Returnships, sometimes call Returner, ReEntry, or Return to Work programs, are like internships for people who already have work experience and relevant skills, but are returning to work after a long absence.
They’re paid, and usually involve some training and mentoring to help get you back up to speed and develop any new skills you might need to get you up to date. A returnship can last anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months.
Things change fast, especially when it comes to technology, so it’s good to be aware that certain skills may have become rusty or outdated while you’ve taken time off work. That doesn’t mean you have to start back at square one, though.
Returnships could be the key to regaining your confidence and getting back on the career ladder. As they’re designed to encourage people to re-enter the workforce after a career break, applying to a returnship scheme can often feel less intimidating than to a traditional job application, too.
The interview process is often abbreviated, with a lot more support for applicants than would ordinarily be offered, and the whole process is designed to help you demonstrate your ability in action, rather than reducing you down to the sum of your resume.
Why Do People Need Returnships?
Taking time off work tends to be stigmatized in our culture, as is perceived as a sign of laziness or a lack of commitment to work.
People choose to take time off work for many reasons, however, and for some, it’s not even a choice; some people take time off work because of health issues that made it impossible for them to keep up with work, others to care for ill or elderly loved ones, or young children.
Common Returnship Scenarios
Some people take time out of a traditional career path to enlist in military service. Some are displaced by violence and economic hardship. Some folks take time to address personal development, heal from injury or illness, or tend to their own self-care.
Women are more likely than men to take time off work, because worldwide women tend to take on more childcare and unpaid labor and care work at home.
Whatever the reason for a career gap, most people discover that it’s incredibly hard to re-enter the workforce after a year or so.
In competitive job markets, recruiters will naturally prefer candidates with more experience and up-to-date credentials.
If you’re basing your decision purely on the apparent merits of someone’s resume, it makes sense that you’d choose a candidate who has worked in the past few years over someone with a noticeable gap on their resume.
However, this creates a significant problem for anyone who steps away from work either by choice or necessity for a period of time, and sets up a bias within our workplaces for hiring the privileged few who haven’t been called on to care for a loved one for a period of time, or who haven’t handled a serious health issue themselves.
Returnships challenge this status quo and ensure that recruiters see past career gaps and give people a chance to prove themselves and demonstrate their skills in action.
Real Returnship Stories
Zeinab Yassin, 32, had work experience in finances and operations before she left the workforce to care for her young children, and three years later when she returned to her career, she found it was harder than she had hoped to get back into it.
“I was rejected more times than I can count, and often overlooked by recruiters. My knowledge and skillsets were compared to candidates who were still working while gaining new experiences in the field. It felt like everything kept moving except for me—I stayed behind,” Zeinab told Career Contessa. “Some recruiters told me to ‘start small’ to get experience, forgoing the experiences and expertise I have accumulated over the years.”
Arathi Shankri, 44, had worked in the software industry as well as working as a computer science instructor for a combined total of 20 years before she took a two-year break to look after her family.
Despite having written technical articles for Medium.com, as well as releasing a small mobile gaming app, and teaching herself mobile programming language alongside her family commitments during her “time off”, the biggest challenge she faced when seeking to get back to work “was to demonstrate my break as time well spent.”
Added to this was the fact that after 17 years in the software industry, the three years she had spent teaching computer science at a community college was seen as time out of the industry rather than an added strength.
“It was difficult to realize that managing over 125 students each semester while concurrently releasing an app for both iOS and Android was not viewed as a valuable experience by recruiters,” Arathi told us.
After going through a returnship, Zeinab now works as a financial analyst at Amazon: “the program’s thoughtful approach allowed me to reclaim my confidence and know I have what it takes to come back to the workforce and thrive,” she explains.
Arathi, who is now a Technical Program Manager at Amazon after going through their returnship program, adds “The program provides you with the opportunity to demonstrate your abilities on a real-time project with mentoring and guidance.”
So many people who have taken time off work for one reason or another just want a chance to show that they’re capable, despite the gaps on their resumes, and returnships provide a space for people to do that.
How Returnships Can Help Address Gender Inequalities at Work
The unfortunate fact is, in a world where women are still doing the majority of the unpaid care, career gaps are a gendered issue.
This discrepancy isn’t new, but it has certainly been exacerbated by the pandemic, during which mothers shouldered the lion’s share of extra childcare, homeschooling, and unpaid labor, forcing many to step back from paid work.
Tami Forman is the founder of the nonprofit Path Forward, an organization that supports employers in creating return to work programs. “Once you’re out, it’s much harder to get back in,” she told Fortune recently. “Women are going to get screwed by what’s happening right now, writ large.”
Mothers face the added burden of discrimination based on commonly held negative perceptions of mothers as being less committed to their jobs, whether or not they took a career break in order to raise children.
It seems that just the awareness that a woman is a mother changes how recruiters think about their applications—a struggle that fathers don’t face.
In one recruitment study, “Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts,” Cordelia Fine shares in Delusions of Gender. Research has revealed evidence of a substantial “motherhood penalty” over the years which impacts mothers’ career and earnings opportunities.
In Fair Play, author and campaigner Eve Rodsky shares that “43 percent of highly qualified women with children take a career detour,” and “The pay gap between mothers and non-mothers… is wider than the pay gap between men and women.”
Returnships can help address gender inequalities at work by requiring recruiters to look past career gaps on resumes and see the value in a candidate who otherwise might be less competitive than their peers on paper.
If we want more women in the workplace, this is an important initiative, as a large percentage of people with career gaps on their resumes are mothers. It also benefits anyone with health issues or who has found themselves in the role of unpaid carer, whatever their gender and life circumstances.
Companies That Offer Returnship Programs
Returnships aren’t a new concept: other companies such as HubSpot, PayPal, Microsoft, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, LinkedIn, Accenture, Credit Suisse, and others offer variations on the returnship.
Amazon recently made headlines as they rolled out a returnship program designed to help displaced workers re-enter the workforce in the wake of the pandemic.
Their approach is thorough, taking into consideration the needs of potential returners at every stage of the process: a dedicated team of returner recruiters help applicants refresh their interview skills, and filter for potential rather than basing decisions purely on how up-to-date an applicant’s resume is.
Chosen candidates then go through the returnship—a paid 16-week training period, supported by a dedicated mentor—after which time candidates that excel are offered a more permanent position at the company.
Returnships acknowledge that there are many highly skilled and capable candidates who struggle to make it back into the workforce after taking time off work for many different reasons, while also dealing with the practical need to refresh certain skills.
Returnships Are Only The Beginning of Much-Needed Changes
Ultimately, returnships are just one part of the solution. For deeper change that will help us build a more inclusive society, our workplaces need to value slow, deep work, and acknowledge that everyone benefits when we prioritize work and family time.
As author Ann Crittenden writes, “For most companies, the ideal worker is ‘unencumbered,’ that is, free of all ties other than those to his job. Anyone who can’t devote all his or her energies to paid work is barred from the best jobs and has a permanently lower life income. Not coincidentally, almost all the people in that category happen to be mothers.”
Men need to shoulder more unpaid labor so that fewer women find themselves in the “she-fault” parent situation, trying to do it all at home as well as making progress in their careers.
As we work towards these deeper cultural shifts, however, returnships are certainly a step in the right direction.
Any program designed to normalize taking time off work and destigmatize career breaks is a positive thing.
As Arathi Shankri put it, her experience of Amazon’s returnship program reinforced her belief that it’s important to prioritize life over work.
It reinforced that there shouldn’t be a stigma around taking time off a traditional career path. “Don’t fear to do what you need to do,” Arathi says. “During my career gap, I kept learning, tried various new things, and extended myself out of my comfort zone.”
Here’s hoping more companies, inspired by the returnship concept, start to think outside the box and do what they can to support and nurture talented people in their efforts to get back to work.
