👋 Welcome to Career Love, a free weekly publication for professional mid-career women who want to be seen and valued for the contribution they make at work.

Career Love · Issue 06 · By Melissa Birchler

This issue uncovers why the most capable woman in the room is so often the one who gets overlooked, and the single shift that makes your value impossible to miss.

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Think about the most capable person you work with. Now ask whether the people deciding her future could say, in one sentence, what problem she is known for solving. Often they cannot name it, and that gap is the whole problem.

I’ve watched this play out in my corporate roles in Australia, Switzerland and Germany. Take two candidates with comparable records. One can say plainly what problem she solves.

The other fumbles to find the words or waffles on with a long-winded explanation. When the next senior role opens, it’s the first candidate who comes to mind, and not because she’s better at the work.

We assume the right people can already see it

We tend to think there are two explanations. The first is confidence, and confidence does play its part. Many capable women hold back from naming their own value out loud.

But the second is less obvious, and I think more important: the assumption that the right people can already see the value you bring to an organization.

The belief that if you simply keep doing excellent work, the people who matter will notice it, understand it immediately, and act on it.

It’s a nice assumption. The trouble is, it rarely plays out that way. The people who decide who gets promoted are usually super busy, and they tend to see only a fraction of what you actually do.

They are not studying your contribution. They are forming a quick impression from whatever is visible and easy to recall. If your value has never been put into clear words, there is nothing for them to hold on to, and an impression about you just emerges organically. Whether it is accurate or not is the question.

This isn’t a competence problem. It’s a visibility and communication problem, and it’s a different thing entirely.

The one-sentence test

Here’s how it shows up in my career coaching work. A client will tell me, with absolute certainty, “I know I’m good at what I do.” I believe her. Her past performance says so.

But when I ask her to explain, in one sentence, what problem she solves, in 9 out of 10 cases, she struggles.

Here's a before and after example highlighting the power of clarity.

The value provided in the second sentence is real. It has simply never been put into words. And what has never been put into words cannot be repeated by a sponsor in a meeting she isn’t in. It can’t travel. It stays a private fact in a place where only public facts get promoted.

The meeting you are not in

Imagine a meeting where your name comes up and you are not in the room. Your sponsor has thirty seconds to say why you are ready. If you have never communicated to them that sentence, they have to invent one on the spot. Most people don’t.

The myth that good work speaks for itself

I believe that we have mistrained a generation of capable women to believe that their work should speak for itself. It’s a great idea in theory. But, unfortunately it is wrong.

Work doesn’t speak. People speak, on the strength of what they can see, remember, and pass on.

If the decision-makers around you can’t describe your value in a sentence, you are leaving them to make one up.

This is where confidence and visibility come together.

Why this feels like bragging

Many women hear “make your value visible” and recoil, because it sounds like self-promotion, like bragging, like becoming the loud and brash colleague they avoid at all costs. So they choose silence and call it integrity and professionalism.

But visibility done well is not bragging. It’s making sure the people who decide have accurate information.

There’s nothing self-serving about being accurately understood. The bragger inflates. The clear professional simply makes sure the record is straight.

That distinction matters, because it is the permission slip that lets capable women step forward without betraying their values. And often, the confidence follows the clarity rather than the other way around.

The three things that actually move a career

This is the problem I am building my career coaching work around. Not polishing CVs. Artificial intelligence has commoditised the CV, and it was never the bottleneck anyway.

The bottleneck with career management for women is upstream: clarity about your distinctive value, the language to express it, and the confidence to let it be seen by the right people.

Get those three right and the rest tends to follow: the promotion, the seat at the leadership table, the more interesting work. Get them wrong, and the most capable woman in the room stays the best-kept secret.

The cost is not only personal

And the cost of leaving this unsolved isn’t only personal. Every organization that loses or overlooks a senior woman it spent years developing is paying for a problem it has misdiagnosed. It assumes its best people are being seen clearly when, in fact, they are not.

The good news is that clarity is a skill. And skills can be taught.

Best,

Melissa

Licensed Career Coach · Gallup Certified Strengths Coach · ICF Member · MAS Career Counselling ZHAW (in progress) · Zurich, Switzerland

Career Love is a free weekly publication for professional mid-career women who want to be seen and valued for the contribution they make at work. Subscribe to get every letter delivered to your inbox.

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👋 Welcome to Career Love — a free weekly letter for mid-career women navigating change at work. Whether you’ve lost a job, started a very different one, or moved your whole life to a new country, this one’s for you.

Career Love · Issue 05 · By Melissa Birchler

This issue covers what a career change does to your identity, and the resources you already have to help you move through it.

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You lose your job. Or you take a new one that turns out to be nothing like the old one or what you expected.

Or you follow a partner to a different country and start again from scratch. On paper, each of these is a change of circumstances. Underneath, something bigger is happening. Your sense of who you are can take a huge hit.

This is the part of a career change that catches people off guard.

We tend to treat a transition as a practical problem.

Update the CV. Learn the new system. Send the applications. Build a network in the new city. All of that is real work. But it’s not the part that is the most difficult.

What is scary is waking up unsure of who you are without the role that used to answer that question for you. Throw in the wild ride of becoming a new parent in the mix of career transition, and things can really get confusing.

Why it shakes who you are

So much of our identity is bundled into what we do all day. A job gives you a title, a place, people who know what you’re good at, and a ready answer to “so, what do you do?” When the job goes, or changes beyond recognition, or gets left behind in another country, all of that goes with it. The self wobbles.

And the further into a career you’ve gone, the more there is to wobble.

By mid-career you’ve spent years being known for something. When that falls away, the question underneath gets loud. If I’m not that, who am I?

In the career coaching room, this shows up again and again. People arrive looking for fast help with the practical side, the CV, the job search, the next step, and slowly realise the real question is who they are now.

Here’s the reframe that helps.

The disorientation isn’t a sign that something’s gone wrong. It’s a sign of an identity in transition, which is a normal and necessary stage, not a detour around the real task. Naming it for what it is takes some of its power away.

How to move through it

1. Start with the identity work before the job hunt, not after.

Get clear on who you are now, what matters to you, and what you want this next chapter to hold, before you start chasing roles.

Clarity about yourself comes first. Skip it, and every decision afterwards feels shaky and carries more risk.

2. Take stock of what you already have to support you.

Any kind of transition can give your confidence a hit, but it’s important to step back and catalogue all the resources that you actually have. You’re more equipped than you think.

Yours are likely to include:

The point isn’t to have all of these in perfect shape. It’s to see that you’re not starting from ground zero. You’re starting from everything you’ve already built. When you can easily connect with your resources during each stage of a career transition, you tend to come out the other side faster and in better shape.

Tiny experiment for this week

Take a sheet of paper and write four headings: strengths, skills, network and support. Spend ten minutes filling in what you already have under each. What surprised you?

Yes - it is normal to be uncomfortable and frustrated. Welcome to the messy middle. You’re in transition. This too shall pass :-).

Want to go deeper?

Best

Melissa

Certified Career Coach · Gallup Strengths Coach · ICF Member · Zurich, Switzerland

Career Love is a free weekly publication for professional women in career transition. Returning. Pivoting. Figuring out what comes next. Subscribe to get every letter delivered to your inbox.

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Career Love · Issue 04 · By Melissa Birchler

This edition is a personal one for me.

In March 2026, I attended Katy Mogal’s Designing Your Life retreat for women in Rome. It was one of those experiences that gets you out of the day-to-day long enough to ask what you actually want next.

I had read Bill Burnett and Dave Evan`s Designing Your Life book based on the most popular undergraduate class at Stanford University and knew that this design thinking framework was the missing link in career coaching.

It addresses the gap I see most often in my coaching work: people who know what they want, commit to action but can’t seem to implement the next steps.

That is why I interviewed Katy to dig more into where women can get stuck with career design and how to get unstuck.

Katy spent more than 20 years in high-tech, including a long stint at Google, before leaving in 2023 and building something entirely her own: immersive life design retreats in Rome for mid-career women.

What sets her work apart is the research behind it: her Midlife Audacity Project interviewed women who had made bold moves in midlife to understand what actually makes those changes possible. The retreats are built on the Design Your Life method and her research findings.

I spoke with her about design thinking, dysfunctional narratives, the art of the small experiment and why overthinking is often just procrastination in disguise.

Katy, you had a long career in high-tech, including Google. How did you end up running life design retreats in Rome?

I’ve always had a history of pivots and change was something I pursued rather than avoided. After my MBA I went into market research, then design research in Silicon Valley around 2005, and eventually a 20-plus-year career in high tech, ending at Google.

I also taught in the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford, which is where Designing Your Life originated, so the framework was always in the ether for me.

When Google did a large-scale layoff in early 2023 (a genuine case study in how not to handle a workforce reduction), I took voluntary redundancy.

I knew two things: I didn’t want a full-time job, and I never wanted to work for a big company again. About six months later, Designing Your Life came to Italy.

I went to the workshop, had a real revelation, trained as a certified facilitator, and partnered with a friend called Barbara Balletta who is an Italian travel designer to create a retreat in Rome.

The city felt right. Rome is a place of reinvention and repurposing. It creates the conditions for genuine possibility thinking.

“Design thinking was the first career design methodology I found that matched how change actually happens — iterative, experimental, and built on curiosity rather than certainty.”

— Katy Mogal

What is it about design thinking that helps people get unstuck?

Two things stand out.

1. The first is learning to treat your moves as experiments rather than irreversible decisions. Women who make successful pivots tend to be natural prototypers — they think: I might not get this right, but I’ll get useful information. That reframe shifts everything. You stop waiting for certainty before you act.

2. The second is learning to tune into the stories you’re telling yourself. A lot of women in midlife carry what I call dysfunctional narratives. These are beliefs about what kind of career they’re supposed to have, what boxes they need to check. At Google, the culture was intensely ambitious. Everyone was racing to the next promotion. You tended not to stop and ask: “do I actually want to be a director? Is that work I’d enjoy?” Design thinking creates the space to notice what’s been handed to you versus what you actually want.

My own revelation came in the workshop itself. I’d convinced myself my next chapter was a master’s degree in Italian literature. When I presented it to the group, the feedback was immediate: you’re not excited about this at all.

You sound like you think you have to do it. They were right. Language study is solitary and fixed. This is the opposite of what energises me. That single piece of feedback changed my direction entirely.

Where do people go wrong when they try to use design thinking to pivot?

The most common mistake is not scoping the experiment small enough. A good prototype is the smallest action that generates real information. Not a thought experiment. Not a five-year plan. A conversation.

I coached someone recently who had spent months in her head thinking about moving into executive coaching. She finally ran a small experiment: pro bono coaching sessions with people in her network.

Afterwards, the question she asked herself wasn’t ‘was I good at it?’, but ‘how did it feel?’ That’s the question that matters.

There’s a story from the Designing Your Life book that I love: a woman in Silicon Valley dreamed of opening an Italian deli. She planned everything: the vendors, the merchandising, the spreadsheets. It was a success.

However, she sold it after six months, because she hadn’t asked herself one question: how is working in retail standing in a store interacting with customers every day actually going to feel? We’re trained to be analytical. We’re not trained to ask what something will feel like from the inside, every day.

“You can be so caught in the wave of performance and promotion that you never stop to ask: what do I actually like doing every day?”

— Katy Mogal

What about women with real constraints — financial pressure, family responsibilities, a career break?

A career pivot doesn’t have to be a dramatic leap. For many women, it has to be a career change that ensures that they keep their income while moving toward something more aligned.

The key is learning to describe your skills at their essence rather than through your job title.

This means reframing what you do: e.g. “I’m not a high-tech UX design leader — I’m someone who unearths insights and helps teams turn them into action. That applies at Google and in a completely different sector.”

The context shifts; the capability remains. Career returners especially tend to undersell themselves here. The red thread is still there after a break. Don’t let the gap convince you it isn’t.

Tell me about your research project.

I’m running the Midlife Audacity Project with a former Google colleague who has an anthropological background. We’re interviewing women who’ve made bold moves in midlife — started businesses, changed countries, left fast-track careers. We have interviewed about 11 women so far.

What sparked it was a pattern from the retreats. One woman would describe something remarkable she’d done — spending half her year in Italy. And then another woman would say, ‘I wish I could do that’, but somehow feel she couldn’t. I kept asking: what’s actually different between those two women?

Our current hypothesis is that the ability to make “bold leaps” is learnable. Our goal from the research is to identify the things that women who feel stuck need to learn, so that they can make their own bold leaps.

What’s the single biggest mistake you see pivoters make?

Overthinking as a way of procrastinating. Research, courses and elaborate planning can all feel productive. However, it is often a very sophisticated way of avoiding the actual risk of trying something and finding out it doesn’t work.

Trying to engineer an entire transition before taking any steps will stall you. Change is iterative, not linear.

The other trap is designing for other people’s approval. This means filtering everything through what sounds impressive, or responsible, or explainable. Design thinking asks you to start from what feels energising.

For high-achieving women who’ve spent decades in corporate environments, that is a genuinely difficult shift. But it’s the right one.

“Overthinking is often just a very productive-feeling way of avoiding the actual risk of trying something. Ask yourself: what am I really accomplishing?”

— Katy Mogal

Any last thoughts?

Reframe what a networking conversation actually is. Prototype conversations in Designing Your Life aren’t about presenting your best professional self or looking for a job. You’re trying to understand what a path actually feels like from the inside.

What do people love about their work? What surprised them? What do they wish they’d known?

This approach makes a conversation more genuine, more interesting, and importantly, less transactional. As a result, people are more generous and willing to give their time.

One woman I interviewed for the Midlife Audacity Project had 60 conversations when she decided to make a move. She got three job offers.

All three came from those conversations. Not one from a job board.

Don’t underestimate the power of talking to people and don’t try to do any of this alone.

Katy Mogal is a certified Designing Your Life facilitator and founder of Designing Your Life Italy, running immersive career design retreats in Rome for mid-career women.

She is also leading the Midlife Audacity Project, a qualitative research initiative documenting bold moves in midlife.

If this article resonated, please share it with someone who needs to stop thinking and start experimenting.

Best,

— Melissa

Certified Career Coach · Gallup Strengths Coach · ICF Member · Zurich, Switzerland

👋 Welcome to Career Love — a free weekly letter for professional mid-career women navigating career transition.

Career Love · Issue 03 · By Melissa Birchler

This issue uncovers which four skills you need to have a fulfilling career and how to get them.

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When I was trying to rebuild my career in Switzerland, I did everything I thought I was supposed to do. I updated my CV. I applied for roles. I waited.

What I didn’t know, and what took me years to understand, was that I was missing something more fundamental than a polished CV or the right contacts. I was missing the competencies to actually manage my own career.

Not the skills to do a job. But the skills to navigate, shape, and direct a career. These are different things and most of us were never explicitly taught them.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

The world of work has changed faster in the last five years than in the previous twenty. Automation is reshaping whole industries. Economic uncertainty means that roles people thought were solid have disappeared overnight. This means that most people will navigate not one career, but several.

The research is clear: the skills to manage your career actively are not personality traits. They are not reserved for people who always knew what they wanted. They are a specific, learnable set of competencies. And developing them is one of the most directly useful things you can do for your professional future.

Critically, the research links these competencies not just to better job outcomes, but to higher career satisfaction. Not salary. Satisfaction. The ability to actively manage your career is directly connected to how fulfilled and purposeful your working life feels.

A research paper by Andreas Hirschi, professor of work and organizational psychology and his team at the University of Bern, commissioned by the Swiss national careers guidance body, identified four core competencies in 2024 that distinguish people who successfully manage their careers from those who feel perpetually stuck, overwhelmed, or at the mercy of external forces. Their findings are based on studies with nearly a thousand employed adults.

Here is what they found, and what it means for you.

The Four Competencies

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Your Whole Life, Not Just Your Job

Hirschi’s model is explicit that career goals and personal goals are intertwined and directly shape each other. What’s happening at home affects what’s possible professionally. Any career plan that ignores this won’t be sustainable in the longer term.

A role that looks perfect on paper but makes your actual life unworkable is not a good career move. A sideways step that fits the season you’re in might be exactly the right one - for now. Taking a holistic view ensures that you make decisions that account for the full picture.

One More Thing on Mid-Career

There’s a widespread idea that mid-career is a time of crisis. Hirschi’s research pushes back on this firmly. Studies consistently show it tends to be a period of high productivity and real confidence, built on experience that simply wasn’t there at 25.

What mid-career does bring is the need to reflect. Are you still going in the right direction? Is this sustainable? Reflection is healthy and also exactly where these four competencies are most useful.

These Skills Can Be Rebuilt

The most important point from this research: these competencies erode during a career break, a relocation, redundancy or any extended period away from professional feedback. Confidence dips. The sense of direction blurs. This is not a character flaw. It is a predictable and well-documented effect of being outside a professional environment.

Your Tiny Experiment This Week

Take 15 minutes. Create four columns in a word doc and write one sentence in each.

• Goals: What do I actually want? What brings me energy? What fits today?

• Resources: What do I have? What do I need to invest in? What’s genuinely in the way?

• Actions: What am I doing about it? What am I avoiding?

• Review: What have I tried? What did I learn from it?

Now look at your four sentences. Which one has energy in it? Which one needs attention? Choose a starting point which feels the easiest (and most fun!) to take you one step closer to your achieving your goal.

Hit reply and tell me what you find.

PS. If you want to read more about the Career Competency Model, visit https://lgk-cgc.ch/. You can also follow Professor Hirschi on LinkedIn or visit his website for more info: https://www.andreashirschi.org/

Best

Melissa

Certified Career Coach · Gallup Strengths Coach · ICF Member · Zurich, Switzerland

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Career Love is a free weekly publication for professional women in career transition. Returning. Pivoting. Figuring out what comes next. Subscribe to get every letter delivered to your inbox.

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👋 Welcome to Career Love — a free weekly letter for professional women in career transition. Returning. Pivoting. Figuring out what comes next.

Career Love · Issue 01 · By Melissa Birchler

When I moved from Australia to a small village in the Swiss countryside in 2011, I closed a chapter more completely than I intended to.

I deleted my LinkedIn profile.

There were reasons — some practical, some about wanting a genuinely fresh start and a new professional identity in a new country. What I didn’t account for was that the profile was not just a page. It was twelve years of professional credibility, connection, and the quiet proof that I was someone worth hiring.

Without it, and with no German language skills, no local network, a rural location an hour from Zurich, and five children who needed me home for the Swiss midday school lunch every day — I found myself facing what I now understand to be a triple constraint: a set of structural barriers so layered that even the most well-meaning career advice simply didn’t apply to me.

Nobody had written the guide for this situation and the career support I found didn`t give me what I needed. So eventually, I wrote it myself.

That’s why Career Love exists.

“I’m not here to help you perform better in a career that no longer fits. I’m here to help you figure out what actually fits — and build the clarity, confidence, and visibility to go after it.”

What my re-entry actually looked like

By 2021, my youngest was old enough that returning to work became possible. But possible and straightforward are very different things.

I was re-entering the Swiss job market with a 12-year break and my specialist consulting expertise in English-only financial and corporate communications had no direct local equivalent.

All of these roles required native German. Plus, the industry had significantly changed with the introduction of freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr. This meant my professional identity that had gradually eroded over a decade without enough positive external feedback to sustain it. The version of me that had thrived in my Australian career felt very far away.

What helped me turn the corner was not a single breakthrough moment. It was five specific things, accumulated slowly and in roughly this order:

• I invested in myself even when I wasn`t 100% clear on the ultimate direction. I completed three intensive online upskilling programmes in English in digital marketing. It was the closest training I could find that would build on my current skill set. That investment was the first signal to myself that I was ready to move. The skills mattered less than what completing them proved to me: I still had the capacity to learn, to focus, and to finish.

• I joined a structured returner programme. I was selected for the “Bring Women Back to Work” programme. This gave me three things simultaneously: upskilling training, a peer cohort of women in exactly the same position, and — crucially — small wins that began rebuilding my professional confidence in a supportive environment.

• I reframed the break rather than apologised for it. Twelve years of managing a seven-person household across a language barrier, in a new country, with no local support network — that is not a gap. It was a ring of fire that forced me to think creatively about how to get back to work. Now as a licensed career coach I help other women do it much faster.

• I said yes to an imperfect opportunity. A temporary maternity cover role as Head of Marketing & Communication Switzerland was a scary leap but a calculated risk. It was the first mastery experience — the concrete proof that my skills had not expired — and it became the launchpad for everything that followed. Head of Employee Communication Central Europe, then Chief of Staff to the Swiss CEO of another tech firm. .

• I started designing my career and my life together, not separately. The rural location 1000 metres above sea level in the Swiss countryside, the school lunch hours, the five children — these were not temporary inconveniences to manage around. I had to deliberately design my life around these parameters as my family is one of my top values. Once I stopped being frustrated with my reality and started working with it, I could finally see the real scope of all my options.

What I would do differently

I have since retrained as a licensed career and strengths coach and am also undertaking intensive post graduate training in a Masters in Career Counselling. I specialize working with women navigating similar career transitions - returning to work, pivoting careers, or figuring out what’s next.

Here is what I wish I had known 10 years ago:

• Maintain some version of your professional presence, always. Regardless of the reason for stepping back — a move, a break, a deliberate reset — keep a minimum professional footprint. A LinkedIn profile costs nothing to maintain. Your network is years of social capital. Losing it is far more costly than keeping it dormant.

• Upskilling is valuable — but notice what it’s really giving you. Those three digital marketing programmes I completed were useful. But the most important thing they did was restore a sense of professional momentum, self confidence and opened my eyes to pivot opportunities. If you’re doing courses and wondering whether they’re “enough” — they are doing more than you think, even before you use the actual content.

• Find support that understands structural barriers. A lot of career advice assumes a level playing field. It does not account for language barriers, lack of personal networks, the hidden job market, or the confidence erosion that comes from a long break in a foreign country. You need support that can distinguish between internal hesitation and genuine external obstacles — because the response to each is completely different.

• Your break is context, not a confession. The most common pattern I see in returning women is the impulse to apologise for the gap before anyone has even asked about it. Stop. Your break is part of your story. Learning to narrate it with confidence — rather than shrinking from it — is one of the most valuable things you can do before you start applying for anything.

• The bridge role is often the strategic role. I held out for the “right” opportunity far longer than was useful. Say yes to the bridge role. You cannot always see where it leads from the beginning.

Who this newsletter is for

Career Love is for professional mid-career women who are navigating the in-between.

Maybe you are returning after a break — months or years. Maybe you are pivoting, ready to move in a new direction but not yet sure which one. Maybe you are simply at a crossroads: experienced, capable, and uncertain what comes next.

Every week I will share one article designed to help you design your career so you can thrive, no matter where you live or your family circumstances.

I would love to hear where you are right now.

Hit reply and tell me: returning, pivoting, or somewhere in between? I read every response personally — and your answer will shape what I write next.

And if someone in your life is navigating a career transition, please forward this to them. It might be exactly what they needed to read today.

— Melissa
Certified Career Counsellor · Gallup Strengths Coach · ICF Member · Zurich, Switzerland

Career Love is a free weekly publication for professional women in career transition. Returning. Pivoting. Figuring out what comes next. Subscribe to get every letter delivered to your inbox.

Career Love · Issue 02 · By Melissa Birchler

This issue tackles a topic I see constantly: the identity shift that happens when you're navigating a major career transition.

I sat down with Kate Mansfield, a UK-based professional career coach with years of experience supporting women in transition, to talk about what's really getting in the way — and what to do about it.

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Kate, you’ve worked with career returners for many years. What do you consistently see when women are trying to get back to work?

It’s a really complicated area of transition. When I talk about returners, I’m talking about highly skilled, professional women — typically highly educated, with 10 to 15 years of career experience before they stepped away. By a career break, I usually mean a minimum of two years. I’ve coached women who’ve been away for up to 20 years and, with the right support, got back into the workplace.

There are a number of things that happen when someone steps away from work. There’s a loss of professional identity. A loss of confidence in themselves as fully competent professionals. A sense that they no longer have relevant skills or strengths to bring. I hear it constantly: I’m rusty. I’m out of touch. What value could I possibly bring?

A lot of imposter syndrome creeps in. And we know that confidence dips for each month of maternity leave — so if you extend that over a period that becomes longer than anyone ever intended, that compounds significantly. Career breaks often start for one reason and then life happens and the break becomes longer and more complex.

Is that belief — that they’ve fallen too far behind — actually true?

Not at all. And if anything, employers who actively want returners back in their organisations will tell you the same thing: we don’t lose our skills. There may be a feeling of rustiness, but skills and strengths are often enhanced by a career break.

Returners bring a different cognitive perspective. They bring life experience. They bring emotional maturity. There may be some technical areas — systems, software — that feel a little rusty, but honestly, we’re all learning in real time about tech. With AI, that’s the same for everybody. The difference for returners is that it’s the psychology and the perception that need attention, not the skills themselves.

“We don’t lose our skills. There may be a feeling of rustiness, but skills and strengths are often enhanced by a career break.” — Kate Mansfield

So where does the real block come from?

One of the biggest is this: how do I talk about my career break? That single question stops more women in their tracks than almost anything else.

I hear so much from people: I’ve just been a mum. I’ve just been a carer. There’s a complete disconnect between how they see their professional identity and what they’ve been doing during the break — even though many of them have continued doing highly skilled things. Voluntary work, school governance, running their own small business, managing complex family logistics. They just don’t connect the dots between those skills and what employers are actually looking for.

A lot of the coaching work is about helping them see the value in what they’ve done, and start to articulate it — with confidence, not apology.

What about the advice women sometimes receive to simply leave the gap off the CV entirely?

It gives me a shiver down my spine, honestly. I believe that you must absolutely include it and not try to hide it. The more career breaks are normalised on CVs, the more opportunity there is for everyone who has ever needed to take one.

That kind of advice — just pretend it didn’t happen — often comes from people who haven’t taken a career break themselves, who haven’t had the benefit of understanding what a different chapter of life looks like. For someone who has been in a different country, a different language, a different identity for seven years, being told to erase it is devastating.

The research is also clear: conventional job search and recruitment methods often won’t work for someone with a significant career break. Not because they aren’t qualified, but because of the biases baked into those systems. Returners need to think differently about how they approach the search — this is where the coaching comes in.

What do you say to women who are right at the beginning — stuck, overwhelmed, not sure where to start?

Start very, very small. And start with strengths.

I often encourage people to try a strengths assessment — something like CliftonStrengths or Via Character Strengths Survey. These are low-cost tools that give you someone else’s language to work with. It’s so much easier than a blank sheet of paper. Then, if they’re brave enough, ask someone else. A partner, a friend, a former colleague. What do you notice about my strengths? What I love about this exercise is that it’s positive. It’s a strength. And other people often notice things we simply can’t see in ourselves, particularly when we’ve been living in a different world for years.

After that, I’d encourage them to start writing. Get things out of your head. What are the beliefs you’re holding about returning to work that might be getting in the way? Just notice them. Write them down. You don’t have to eradicate them — but if you can name them, you can start to work with them. If you only feel them, it’s very hard to move beyond.

Find a support network. Even telling two close friends that you’re thinking about returning to work can be a huge step. One of my clients recently did exactly that — and was met with such positivity and support that it shifted something for her. That’s where you start. Really small experiments, built on slowly.

You mentioned perfectionism — tell me more about that.

It’s a big one. Many of these women were high achievers in their earlier careers, so they approach returning to work with perfectionist tendencies. They are looking to get back in at a similar level, while simultaneously having very low confidence. That combination can make the prospect of returning quite daunting.

A lot of the coaching is about helping them see this has to be incremental. A stepping stone approach. You build the confidence, the CV, the networks — and over time, you get back to where you were. But you can’t leap there from a standing start.

We also talk a lot about the psychology of postponement. I’ll go back at some point. I’ll go back when the children are older. I’ll go back when things settle down. But something always comes up — a parent who needs care, a child navigating a difficult patch at school. Those things will still come up when you’re back at work. And we manage. We flex. We adapt. Working can actually give you something: your identity, your professional self, your own income, your independence and social connections.

What about the fear of taking a role that’s “beneath” where you were?

It’s real, and I understand it. But we call it the trade-off scenario. What are you willing to trade off to get back into an organisation — to rebuild your confidence and your professional identity? You might be earning less than you’d like for a period of time. But what will you gain? Return-to-work programmes work particularly well here because they’re a defined period, with a clear pathway forward.

Something a level or two below where you eventually want to be is a sensible, strategic trade-off — not a failure. And more often than not, the opportunity comes through your network anyway. Not through a job board. This brings us back to the work of articulating your story: being able to say, confidently, I’m a professional, I took a break, I’ve been focused on my family, during that time I developed these skills, and now I’m looking for opportunities in XYZ.

Not defending. Not apologising. Just telling it.

“Not defending. Not apologising. Just telling it.” — Kate Mansfield

What frameworks do you find useful for the transition itself?

There are two that I always return to. William Bridges’ transition model is so helpful for normalising what’s happening. There’s the thing you’ve left behind — the identity of being a full-time mother or carer — and the new beginning you haven’t quite reached yet. And in the middle is what Bridges calls the neutral zone: messy, emotionally charged, uncertain. A lot of women get stuck there and think something is wrong with them. Nothing is wrong. This is a transition. It takes time and care and support.

The other is Ibarra’s Working Identity — this idea that we have many possible selves. You transitioned into motherhood once. That was probably also strange and disorienting at first. You became conditioned to it. And now you’re transitioning again — back toward a professional self who was always there, who never actually left. Reminding people of that can be very stabilising.

One last thing you’d want to share?

Don’t overlook what needs to shift at home.

This is the piece that often gets missed entirely. Women do the psychology work, they find the role, they start — and then it falls apart because nobody prepared for what it would mean for the family. If you’ve been running everything at home for ten years, returning to work is a mini change-management programme for the whole household.

Draw a time diagram. Look at what you currently do. What needs to shift? Who takes it on? The invisible load has to be redistributed. The guilt — and there will be guilt — has to be acknowledged and worked through. This has to be set up sustainably, or it won’t hold.

Finally, find some role models. Career Returners has a wonderful podcast. Listen to the women who’ve done it, who were exactly where you are, who thought it was impossible. Because they did it. And so can you.

“I’ll go back when things settle down. But something always comes up. Those things will still come up when you’re back at work. And we manage. We flex. We adapt.” — Kate Mansfield

Kate Mansfield is the Programme Director and a career coach at Career Counselling Services UK working with clients across a wide range of career transitions. She previously worked with Career Returners and co-authored a chapter on women returning to work in The Holistic Career Coaching Handbook (2024).

If this article resonated with you, please share it with anyone who may be thinking or (even overthinking!) about getting back into the workforce. And if you’re somewhere in the middle of this transition yourself and need support — I’d love to hear from you.

— Melissa