The Career You Never Planned For May Lead to Your Dream Job Heres How

The Career You Never Planned For May Lead to Your Dream Job Heres How Like many women, Lisen petersberg did all that she could to prepare herself for success in the workforce. She went to college, got an MBA, forged strong connections and pursued a career in marketing.I checked all the boxes, Stromberg explained during a webinar hosted by Fairygodboss Co-founder and President Romy Newman. But after the birth of my first child, I went back into the work world and honestly welches astonished to find myself leid on the same trajectory as I had been on, she said.Her boss at the time had a stay-at-home spouse. He kept asking me, Dont you want to be home with your son? Stromberg recalled. Despite challenges and biases, she resolved to continue chasing the career path shed set out on. It welchesnt until she was on bedrest while pregnant with her second child that she was forced to karenz her career and reflect on what was going on both at work and at home.Post-maternity leave, Stromberg ap proached her boss in the hopes of agreeing on a new kind of schedule that would help her better manage her family and work priorities. Their response was, Be all in, or be gone, she said. So she quit her job with no safety net and made it her mission to find out how women were navigating their growing careers alongside growing families.Ultimately, Stromberg whos now Partner and COO of the 3% Movement, which works to change the ratio of women in leadership in advertising interviewed nearly 200 women and published Work Pause Thrive How to Pause for Parenthood Without Killing Your Career. The book reveals how how trailblazing women have disrupted the traditional career paradigm to achieve their personal and professional goals and how forward-thinking companies are capitalizing on their talents.Here are some of her key takeaways for career-minded women who are starting or thinking about starting families, and for mindful employers who want to offer their employees more untersttzun gsangebot.1. Pausing your career is leid career suicide.When Stromberg began studying womens career paths, she surveyed 1,500 women and found that while only 11 percent of respondents thought they would pause their career after having kids, 72 percent either completely left or shifted to some kind of part-time work, at least temporarily. Newman recalled that when she had her first kid, I think I spent about a year thinking to myself, If I step off the treadmill, I will never be able to get back on. If I dont work my butt off through these really hard years, I wont ever have the career I wanted to have. If theres one message I want to tell our audience, its Yes, its OK. Almost every woman is doing this in some form.2. Theres bedrngnis one right way to approach pausing your career.In her book, Stromberg refers to a few different models of successful career pausing, based on the experiences of women she interviewedThe Cruiser, referring to women who stayed at the same company but scale d back temporarily, and then re-engaged full time when the time was rightThe Boomeranger, referring to women who completely left the workforce and then managed to get back into their careers after a breakThe Pivoter, referring to women who completely left the workforce and then ended up changing careers when they re-entered the workforce3. You may not get the career your planned for, but you might get the career you never planned for.As Stromberg put it, careers are not predictable but getting thrown off your anticipated track can often be a blessing in disguise. For Newman, thats certainly the case had she not paused her corporate career in digital ad sales after having kids, shed likely never have co-founded Fairygodboss which has turned out to be her dream company.4. Millennials are changing what the traditional workplace narrative looks like and this means companies need to support both men and women as they become parents.In decades past, traditional gender roles and paths l argely dictated what workplace dynamics looked like and what was plausible for women and men. But as millennials become parents, those dynamics have begun shifting. Sixty-four million millennials will become parents within the next decade, explained Stromberg. The millennials are the best-educated generation weve ever had. If youre a workplace that isnt figuring out how to navigate parenting for your employees, youre going to be screwed.Stromberg added that her research has revealed that the majority of men 67 percent are planning to pause or scale back their careers. Its not just the women who are demanding better work-life integration its men, too. This is a new reality, Stromberg said. What I saw is our generation of women trailblaze this path for nonlinear careers, and thats the path we have to support, she added, emphasizing the importance of inclusive parental leave (that men feel comfortable taking)5. Its not only parents who need these kinds of supports at work.Career pau sing is not exclusive to parents. In her research, Stromberg spoke to many women who never paused their careers because they had kids, but they did when they had aging parents or needed to care for an ailing loved one. I even spoke to women and men who were athletes, who wanted to run a marathon, for example, and were looking for companies that would let them make time to do that, Stromberg shared.If retirement is not going to come until were 70, we want to be able to make time for ourselves, added Newman.Stromberg stressed that companies need to offer and trust their employees with time mastery a term she uses in place of flexibility.Companies should be thinking about how to offer that to as many employees as possible, she said. It has to be baked into the DNA of the culture. It has to be understood that when John goes home at 5, hes not actually not ambitious. Hes likely logging on to his computer again after his kids go to bed. If you trust John to get his work done, the whole t eam will function better.6. Return-to-work programs are on the rise. Use themFor women who find the prospect of returning to work daunting, Stromberg suggests looking into which companies offer return-to-work programs, which are specifically designed to ease the transition back to the workforce.Ultimately, Stromberg and Newman concluded, navigating your career alongside personal changes is all about our most precious resource time. Fortunately, companies like Fairygodboss help women investigate what kinds of companies will allow them the space to dictate their own time mastery, however that balance may shift throughout their careers.