This week I had a very happy and excited call from Jo who had secured ‘serious’ employment after twelve years of being a mother and a very busy participator in her community, in both paid and unpaid work.
Jo outlined the steps that had enabled her to get to this point. Before I met with her, she and her family had identified financial and other goals. The work we did together was to identify her strengths. She then ‘mined’ her experience, both paid and unpaid, to think of times when she had used her strengths to benefit specific pieces of work, using verbs to describe the particular actions she had taken that made the difference. With this information, we wrote a CV that made claims about what she could contribute to an organisation and provided the evidence or proof from the examples she had come up with.
Along the way, Jo told me that she had had a big setback when a young recruiter clearly made a judgement about her experience (mother returning to the workforce) and minimalised what she had to offer. Her response was to use the networks she had within her family and friends to gain a referral to a recruiting consultant. They recognised what she had to offer, and backed her to get a role that was an excellent fit for her experience, strengths and interests. This process took several months, and it would have been easy to give up.
Jo told me it was the work we had done together and her CV that gave her the confidence ‘to give it a go’ and keep going in the face of setbacks to get a very good result.
Jo outlined the steps that had enabled her to get to this point. Before I met with her, she and her family had identified financial and other goals. The work we did together was to identify her strengths. She then ‘mined’ her experience, both paid and unpaid, to think of times when she had used her strengths to benefit specific pieces of work, using verbs to describe the particular actions she had taken that made the difference. With this information, we wrote a CV that made claims about what she could contribute to an organisation and provided the evidence or proof from the examples she had come up with.
Along the way, Jo told me that she had had a big setback when a young recruiter clearly made a judgement about her experience (mother returning to the workforce) and minimalised what she had to offer. Her response was to use the networks she had within her family and friends to gain a referral to a recruiting consultant. They recognised what she had to offer, and backed her to get a role that was an excellent fit for her experience, strengths and interests. This process took several months, and it would have been easy to give up.
Jo told me it was the work we had done together and her CV that gave her the confidence ‘to give it a go’ and keep going in the face of setbacks to get a very good result.
If you are returning to the workplace and not sure of your strengths and how to market them, do get in touch to discuss possibilities for working together.
Beth
Beth
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