Carrie had worked in investment banking and private equity before leaving work after the birth of her first child. She took a total of 11 years off with her two children. While she was staying at home and caring for her children, she focused her volunteer efforts on her childrens' schools serving on a number of Boards and special committees. She also kept in touch with her most recent boss at a private equity firm, who often tried to lure her back to work. But they could never come up with a role that would enable her to remain as involved with her children as she wanted to be. Recently, the perfect job became available. The private equity firm asked Carrie if she would manage the assets of its foundation. . Although she had no investment management experience, the private equity firm's management believed that the skills she had developed in investment banking and private equity could enable her to develop a strategy for the portfolio, vet money managers and keep the foundation's finances on an appropriate course. In addition, her experience in private equity would be useful when evaluating in which private equity funds the foundation should invest. The fact that management knew Carrie and trusted her implicitly more than made up for the fact that she didn't have "investment management" on her resume.

In terms of fitting into her life as an involved parent, the job is totally results oriented. Her bosses don't care where she is or when, as long as the job gets done. Also, the job is not time-sensitive like transaction-based work, so she doesn't face relentless time pressure. Finally, when she interacts with money managers, she's the client, so meetings can generally be scheduled at her convenience.

Carrie is thrilled with her new position. She's deeply engaged in her work. But she still has a life.

Entrepreneurship

Barbara's career has gone through several distinct phases. Her first professional degree was in city planning. After about three years in a public policy role, friends convinced her to apply to an MBA program. She did and was admitted, contingent on taking a summer course in math. But she chose not to take the math course and found herself pregnant, instead. In phase two, she returned to work in another public policy position when the first baby was 3 months old. After the second baby, 4 years later, she entered phase three and worked part time and as an independent consultant. This was a great, flexible way to keep some professional role but also be the home room mom, make the school plays, do car pool and be home (usually) after school. After a decade of part time project consulting, finding she was only hired to do the things she'd already done, she missed the variety of new challenges. Her son was in 6th grade and her daughter was in high school. Wondering what life would have been like, had she decided to take that math course and go to business school 15 years earlier, she petitioned for a deferred admission to the MBA program that had accepted her previously. The admissions office staff laughed. Deferrals rarely go beyond a year. But she reapplied and was accepted (without the math course). Phase four: business school, with classmates 20 years her junior. She loved the challenges of life with her fellow classmates. But older alums warned her that she should make her own way as an entrepreneur and not try to follow the career path of her 28 year old fellow students. Phase five: She ignored the warning, at first. Combining her city planning experience with her recently acquired financial skills, Barbara planned to relaunch her career by joining a power company doing infrastructure development. Even the best laid plans of a new MBA can take surprising twists. First she took on an operations consultant role, spending her weekdays as a road warrior commuting to the West coast and weekends back East with her family. Her daughter had just entered college at the time, but her son was only 14, and the bi-coastal routine was a challenge.

Phase six: She was thinking about making a change, when she ran into a business school classmate. Instead of talking about their jobs, they talked about their feet. Yes, their feet. Both wear a size 11/1/2, and they were lamenting the lack of fashionable shoes in that size. Shortly thereafter, she met a friend's father who was a footwear veteran She was discussing the big foot problem with him when he said, "you've got an MBA. Why don't you do something to revolutionize the footwear industry?' So that's what she did. With a fascination for the newly emerging e-commerce market born from reading Isaac Asimov and William Gibson, she developed a business model that would sell shoes on line. After a year of research and bootstrapping (pun intended), she launched www.DesignerShoes.com, a website to sell fashion shoes in the hard to find sizes that regular shoe stores never carried. But because she didn't think she was ready to look for investor capital and because banks wouldn't loan her start up capital without a lease, she had to also open a shoe store for big and wide feet on Boston's posh Newbury street. She'd intended to build on her background in city planning and with her finance training, she expected to build power plants in southeast Asia. She had never thought of herself as a retailer, let alone one in the fashion business. Now the owner of DesignerShoes.com, "the largest women's shoe retailer in the world specializing exclusively in hard to find sizes for women who leave a larger footprint," can't think of herself any other way.

Marla had been a kids' marketer. In fact, she was one of the geniuses behind Becky, Barbie's wheel-chair bound friend. But after a 9-year break from the fulltime workforce, four of them spent as a trailing spouse in Thailand, Marla has taken on a very different professional challenge. She's head of marketing for Extend Fertility, Inc. The way Marla went about her job search provides an almost "textbook-case" in how to remarket yourself after years "out of the market." Here's a summary of what she did: First of all, almost all the volunteer work or consulting projects she undertook while on career break were marketing related. And she described these experiences in person and on her resume just as she would a paid marketing job. For example, running her school's themed fundraising event became "designed and executed Ward School's International Night, increasing attendance and dollars raised by x and y percent over the prior year." Secondly, she consciously expanded her network by starting an alumni club for her graduate school alma mater in her city, where none previously existed. Finally, after turning down an offer from a major toy company due to issues over the in-office time commitment, Marla decided she needed to expand her search. She leveraged her consumer marketing experience, expertise in marketing to women and passion for women's and family issues to secure her current position as VP of Marketing for Extend Fertility. The innovative healthcare company offers egg freezing services to women in their 20's and 30's. See www.extendfertility.com

Marla's search lasted about a year, but she ended up with exactly what she was looking for: a meaty fulltime job marketing something she could be passionate about.

Prior to having children, Ami lived her "Advertising Dream" of living and working in New York City. She was a Media Buyer for some of the largest advertising agencies in the world, including Ogilvy & Mather and McCann-Erickson. She was happily working as a Media Buyer for Time Warner Cable, when her husband's job brought them to Massachusetts in 2003. 

 

Ami briefly went into TV sales in Boston, during which time she became pregnant with her first child. Taking a few months off turned into a year, and a year turned into two, and so on. During this "time off", Ami became pregnant with her second child. She did a lot of volunteer work through her Temple, mainly organizing charity drives and events for new moms. When Ami decided that she wanted to go back to work in the Summer of 2007, she thought that finding a job would be a piece of cake. She couldn't have been more wrong!

 

After an extensive six month job hunt, Ami finally landed a Media Buying job at Davis Advertising in Worcester, MA. Only a 15 minute commute from her home/daycare facility, Ami is thrilled with the opportunity and the position. Davis is a growing shop and they are allowing Ami the flexibility to use her existing skills, as well as broaden her horizons into areas of new media.  Ami couldn't be happier with the Work/Life balance that Davis Advertising Provides.