Lindsay Downes never planned to be a stay-at-home mom. She always assumed she would return to work after the birth of her first child. But then her husband’s career in the U.S. Navy took them overseas, and then she had a second baby, and then the pandemic hit. A year-long maternity leave stretched into a seven-year break.
“I had a lot of insecurity about the fact that I had always been a really high performer, and here I was not performing,” Downes, 39, acknowledged recently.
When the family moved from Virginia to San Diego for her husband’s final naval assignment, she was more than ready for a reset — and a return to work.
Still, she didn’t want to go back to her previous field of early-childhood education. Inspired by her mother-in-law, who became a financial adviser after raising her own kids, Downes decided to pursue a career change into the financial services industry.
Making such a big transition didn’t happen overnight. “It took four years of grinding it out to find myself in the place I really wanted to be in,” she said.
Here are suggestions from Downes and career experts to help with such transitions.
Don’t worry about the macro environment
Women returning to the workforce after an extended break for caregiving responsibilities is nothing new. On average, 24 percent of women step away from paid work in their first year of motherhood, and after children reach school age, it’s not unusual for some of these women to want to jump-start their careers.
But doing so can seem more intimidating when headlines about the job market are so bad. While U.S. unemployment has generally held steady this year, it’s taking job seekers an average of 12 weeks to secure new positions, and as of September, more than a quarter of unemployed workers had been out of work for more than six months.
Carol Fishman Cohen’s recommendation? Don’t dwell on the macro economic trends when beginning a job search. And she should know. After an 11-year career break from corporate finance to raise four kids, Cohen returned to the workforce in 2001 amid a recession.
Six years later, her personal experience led her to co-found iRelaunch, an organization that would pioneer the concept of “returnships,” internship-type programs for women (and men) looking to reenter the workforce after extended time away.
It was an inauspicious time for a venture focused on facilitating hiring. In fact, one of the first clients was Lehman Brothers, the firm whose collapse in part triggered the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession. Yet iRelaunch and its returnships flourished. By 2014, the organization had helped five corporations pilot returnship programs, and it teamed with the Society of Women Engineers to form a STEM Reentry Task Force. Today, it has over 330 employer partners and has helped thousands of people restart their careers.
Cohen credits iRelaunch’s success to the quality of the candidates these programs attract. It’s a top-caliber pool, she said. “People don’t lose their ability to be a high performer simply because they take a career break.”
Own your caregiving experience
Caregivers jumping back into the job market need to reframe their feelings about their career break, said Lauren Smith Brody, founder of the Fifth Trimester. Think about how your caregiving skills — time management and navigating difficult interpersonal relationships, for example — directly translate to marketable job skills.
For Downes, age and personal experience gave her advantages over 20-something college grads when pursuing a career in financial services.
“I had real-life experience,” she said. “I’ve had two kids. I’ve traveled and lived around the world. I had bought houses and cars and done the financial things. I’ve done retirement planning.”
In 2022, LinkedIn began offering members the opportunity to add career breaks to their profile, similar to how they add a job position. The options listed range from full-time parenting to relocation, with space to include highlights of up to 2,000 words.
People use the section to share how they honed their skills during their time away from the workforce, said Catherine Fisher, LinkedIn’s career expert. Perhaps unsurprisingly, far more women use the tool than men, according to data from LinkedIn.
The decision to add this feature grew out of job trends during the pandemic, when nearly 12 million women left the U.S. workforce. Though employment levels for mothers initially rebounded and even surpassed pre-pandemic levels, since 2025 there has again been an increase in women exiting the workforce — both by choice and because of layoffs. As of September, 451,000 fewer women were working than in January, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
The sheer number of women stepping in and out since the pandemic helps to shift the narrative. A nonlinear career path isn’t an anomaly. It’s a reality for millions of Americans.
And your professional reputation doesn’t change just because you’ve left the workforce, Cohen stressed. Former colleagues often have an opinion of you that’s essentially “frozen in time,” she said, and you can use that to your advantage in your job search.
Be sure to tap your networks
The lines between colleagues and friends are blurrier today, Brody said, and that can make networking easier. She encourages people to tap their friends as potential leads for new jobs. “Don’t feel like that’s overly transactional,” she added. “Everyone likes to be helpful.”
But take some time to nurture your network before you dive back into the job search. This doesn’t have to be a huge lift. It could be a comment on an Instagram or LinkedIn post, or a periodic text to share a life update or photo. As Fisher put it, “There’s nothing worse than reaching out to somebody you haven’t talked to in a year and saying, ‘Hey, can you help me?’”
During the decade she was out of the workforce, Cohen still went to her former boss’s annual holiday party. When she finally shared her interest in returning to work, her old colleagues immediately became her biggest cheerleaders, she said, and they even helped her find a new job.
Consider taking a step back to move forward
Caregivers who are reentering the workforce may need to take a step back before they take a leap forward. Many returnship programs are a lot like college internships — temporary work arrangements that don’t necessarily promise permanent employment.
“We encourage people, especially if they’re interviewing or pursuing a role at a smaller company, to suggest an internship-like experience: a contract role, covering [a current employee’s] maternity leave or a special project,” Cohen said.
Individuals looking to make a career change may need to start out on the lowest rung of their new career ladder.
That’s what Downes ultimately did, taking an assistant role at a large brokerage firm. The work was not fun or fulfilling, and it was especially challenging when her husband was deployed. With no family close enough to offer support, for a while she was paying a nanny to come every morning to help get her two boys to school.
The cost of that two and a half hours of care was more than half her take-home pay. But she saw it as an investment in her career — and in her family’s financial future.
“I had to adopt a beginner’s mindset, even though I wanted to be further on,” she said. “But my maturity level and my work ethic helped propel me forward.”
After four years of the grind, Downes landed her dream job at Winged Wealth Management and Financial Planning, a registered investment adviser that works with military families.
“When I read the job description, I had the physical feeling in my body as if there was a lock in the middle of my chest,” she said, “and it was like a key fitting into a lock.”
This piece was published with The Purse, a media company covering women and money.
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