Career Comeback Event 2019

By Demi Halma

The Career Comeback Event about returning to the workforce was held in New York City, December 10, 2019. The event was about improving the knowledge about how (wo)men could have a successful career comeback after they have been out of work for a longer period of time. The main focus was about sharing experiences with each other and exploring the difficulties (wo)men may encounter and what you could do to prepare yourself for these difficulties.

Kota hosted this event at the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) in the Women’s Lab, New York. Jaana Rehnstrom, president of The Kota Alliance, and Demi Halma, current intern at the Kota Alliance, welcomed the audience. Six women attended this focus group event, all with their own story about their career comebacks. Every woman had a different background with a different story. Everyone was very open about their experiences. This way, we could help each other and reflect on critical life events that affected our career cycles.

The women who attended this event came from different work fields, from the corporate world to the non-profit side. We talked about career comebacks within the sectors of human resources, advertising, teaching, fashion, and the financial sector. The discussion around this topic highlighted that there was not just one story of a career comeback. For this reason, there is not just one straight-forward solution to this problem affecting people of higher age. However, because every woman had a different story, we were able to help each other by combining our experiences. Together we discovered new solutions to this problem, such as ‘returnships’ instead of internships. These returnships are programs that are designed by some companies to help women get back into the workforce.

The focus group also pointed out that critical life events could be a reason for women to change their jobs. Critical life events are major events in people’s lives, which cause someone to go through personal development. These critical life events could either be positive or negative (Northouse, 2019), and can clear people’s minds about what they actually want in life. So, critical life events stimulate personal growth in different aspects of life, and can change someone’s view on their career: it could be a reason to make a major career switch. Another reason could be that you do not fit in a specific box. Because you have years of experience in different career paths, you are not fully experienced in just one subject. That could be overwhelming for some companies who would like to hire people; “overqualified” is used as a reason not to hire someone!

Besides the reasons why women could get out of the workforce, we discussed how people got back in. As mentioned, some women were helped by applying to so called ‘returnships’. Some people got back in by starting with some voluntary work. In this way they learned the skills they needed and could apply to a job afterwards. Or they got a paid job at the place they started do voluntary work.

We felt this event was very helpful for the guests as well as for us, the Kota members. Thank you to everyone who came and shared!