After millions of women left their careers to assume childcare responsibilities during the pandemic, many are now planning their return to the workforce.
However, explaining resume career gaps when job searching can present a whole new set of challenges, especially as past reports indicate that mothers who take time off work to care for children face more job rejection when reentering the workforce than those simply looking to change jobs.
To help working parents relaunch their careers and connect them to more flexible work options, FlexJobs has shared the following tips on how to explain and conquer employment gaps on resumes, as well as 15 great work-from-home jobs (listed below).
Explaining and Conquering Employment Gaps on Resumes
Add a “Career Break” Placeholder on Your Resume
It might be helpful to add a new entry in your professional experience section: Career Break. By addressing the gap directly on your resume, you’re helping both the applicant tracking systems and people reading your resume understand why you have a gap.
To do this, you’d add your career break just like any other job, with the job title as Career Break, Planned Career Break, or Professionally Active Career Break, and the dates it occurred.
We’ve created a PDF with sample Career Break sections for your resume so you can see what this might look like in practice.
One study compared job applicants who disclosed a reason for their work gap to those who did not. It found that candidates who provided reasoning for their work gap on their resume and cover letter received 60% more interviews than those who did not give a reason at all.
Change Your Resume Format
On the resume itself, you may not be comfortable addressing the gap at all, or there may not be a brief enough way to describe it in a “Career Break” entry like the one we describe above. In this case, you can consider using a functional resume format instead (listing your experience by skill area and putting your positions and their dates last).
15 Great WFH Jobs for Working Parents
A recent FlexJobs survey of more than 1,100 parents with children 18 or younger living at home found that 61% of parents say they want to work remotely full-time, and 62% say they would quit their current job if they can’t continue remote work post-pandemic. Below are 15 great remote career options that are currently hiring and give parents the flexibility to work from home!
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