Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep87: Should I take a career break? What happens.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Grow Your Career Online and Offline podcast. Today, let's talk about some interesting topic and it's about career break. So I've been in a lot of conversations on LinkedIn in the past couple of days

Starting point is 00:00:43 and I feel like this big team around the great resignation where we're seeing a lot of young people particularly particularly Gen Z leaving their supposedly fancy jobs to find their purpose to improve their mental health and really to yeah take a break so let's talk about it today. And I think there's this common misconception or rather fear that if you were to take a career break, it would reflect very poorly in your career. It will create a resume gap and you might get judged negatively about it by recruiters, HR, hiring managers. But yeah, simply said, you will reduce your chances of landing your next job should you have a resume gap or a career break.

Starting point is 00:01:39 So I think this is a bit of a more traditional way of thinking about career breaks. And personally for me, I did take a career break once in my career. So it was in mid-2016 when my mom was quite ill. So I decided to actually leave my job at Standard Chartered to return to Malaysia to be a caregiver. So at that time, I felt that there were a lot of people who reached out to me and told me that, hey, you know, Miping, I know that, you know, you want to go back to Malaysia, but you are doing so well in this company, you're doing so well in this team. Do you really want to give it up or is it worth it or maybe you could find some other options and you know it's really going to negatively impact your career

Starting point is 00:02:31 if you were to just resign because it didn't sound it didn't sound to I guess it didn't make a lot of sense to them pretty much my colleagues that oh how could you give all this thing up right I? I mean, you don't necessarily have to take a career break, you can do like a 50-50 sort of thing. So I did think about it. And I decided that it's not, I mean, the job wasn't necessarily the priority at that point. But I think this really depends on like each individual circumstances as well so for me i think being a caregiver spending time with my mom when she was ill was way more important to me than um really figuring out oh actually what's going to happen to my career

Starting point is 00:03:16 um however i do think that nowadays there are a lot of people who for the lack of better word I don't feel like they are actually equipped with the right mindset and skill set to actually succeed in the corporate world so what has happened is that they are unable to align the expectations and hence they are unable to actually perform due to lack of skills amongst other things and that actually creates a lot of stress and that makes these people feel like hey you know maybe this job is just not suitable for me or i'm so stressed out i need to take a break so taking a break to get new perspectives to reflect and reset re-strategize i think these are all really really good things and

Starting point is 00:04:06 it's something that i highly advocate as well and i think if you check out um episode 85 i think i talked a little bit more about why you should always reflect reset and re-strategize and that could actually help you come back stronger right as, as you continue on your career journey, which will probably take, you know, 10, 20, maybe even 30 years as well. But there is one thing that I also want to highlight, and that is the concept of escaping a problem. So I repeat that. Are you escaping a situation disguised as taking a career break right because sometimes along our career journey it's not necessarily hunky-dory all the time i mean like i'm sorry like this is life you know we just need to grow we just need to keep learning and keep getting better so i have also met a lot of people and even during one-on-one sessions as well i find that past traumatic working experiences really leaves an emotional um dent or rather

Starting point is 00:05:16 personal emotional challenge on the professional right on the individual on the person itself so what has then happened is that they continue on in their career, but half the time, like mentally and emotionally, they are not there. So they decide to, in some instances, decide to take a break and hope that this problem, right, is going to go away, right? The problem could be potentially getting fired from a job or maybe even not getting your probation confirmed. Or it could even be the case where you were put on performance plan, you know, performance improvement plan. And you felt that, oh, my God, this is so embarrassing and this is so humiliating. I couldn't, you know, my ego cannot take this, which is understandable.

Starting point is 00:06:02 So there could be multiple reasons why some people could be could feel emotionally tortured in a way right and i completely understand that but the point i'm trying to make here is that um the reason why you're taking that career break i think that needs to be very clear so if you have like a really important, you know, focus point or something really important you want to do, then yeah, go, go, go ahead. Right. Do that. But just make sure that, like I said earlier, you are not in the mode of like trying to escape because that is a completely different conversation. And I have also met and worked with people where after like spending you know one or two years taking a career break and then when they try to get in back into the workforce guess what the mindset they haven't actually overcome the mindset or they haven't still developed the skill set that is

Starting point is 00:06:56 needed so what then happens is that they still have very low confidence trying to get back into a job right trying to continue on in their career and trying to move back into a job, right, trying to continue on in their career, and trying to move back into the corporate world. And because of the lack of like mindset and skill set, what then happens is that they find it actually very difficult to get a job, because there's just very low confidence, and they don't know what they want. And they're consistently telling me that, oh, but but like, what if this fails? And what if it doesn't work out? So that means that even though they took this, you know, the person took like a one, one two or even three years career break they did not actually overcome their emotional or rather workplace challenges in a very um productive maybe the

Starting point is 00:07:39 word is not productive but um in a very conducive way meaning like they actually didn't really overcome some of these feelings it's more like okay this is an uncomfortable feeling i'm just going to shove it to the corner and like not think about it or not feel those feelings again without realizing that actually these are the things that will hold them back and i have worked with clients like that as well like after three years four years later they're like hey this thing it's been a long time i thought i got over it but i still haven't and the reason is because they took the career break like they had this career gap as an escape so i just want to remind you all to make sure that um for real valid reasons yeah sure but if you're trying to escape something it's really worthwhile to really figure out what are you trying to escape from and more importantly what can you do to fix some of those

Starting point is 00:08:28 gaps right if you have some mindset challenges then yeah i mean ask yourself why why why do you feel that way and if you have some skill set challenges okay that is actually easier so there are a lot of like courses out there you can go and get mentoring you can go and watch youtube videos like actually work on upskilling yourself and if you were in an unfortunate situation where you got fired in the past or you put on performance improvement plans then this is a great opportunity for you to really reset and improve from this point on so in terms of like what you should actually do during a career break, and this is what I have personally done to ensure that I actually had a very smooth sailing journey to get back into my corporate role, in fact, in a more senior position as well, was to make sure that you utilize LinkedIn as a professional networking platform. So when I left Standard Chartered as a manager, I kept in touch with a lot of my ex-colleagues and particularly not just the team I was working in, right, in terms of like the bosses and the team members, but I also connected with a lot of my stakeholder groups.

Starting point is 00:09:41 So there were some business partners that I worked with closely and multiple stakeholders as well. So quite a few of them I've made a really good impression on. And even during my break for about seven months, there were quite a few of them who consistently checked in with me, asked me what I was doing and whether, you know, if I felt that I was ready to return, right, I could always reach out to them for a conversation. So it's been overall very positive. And like I said, even though I was a caregiver at that time, it didn't mean that I couldn't do anything else, right? You could still read out on industry trends, you could work on your soft skills, you can work on your technical skills. And most importantly, make sure that you keep your network active, particularly on LinkedIn. And that's something that I found really, really, really helpful for myself.

Starting point is 00:10:28 So when I was ready to return to the working world, like about seven months later, I got in touch with a couple of folks who had been reaching out to me and pretty much there was already an offer on the table. So when I returned, I was offered associate director with much better pay as well. So I think sometimes we tend to underestimate our professional network. So it's something to really take note of. And the other thing also is make sure that you have a valid reason for your career break right valid reason for your

Starting point is 00:11:07 resume gap and that actually makes it easier to communicate to somebody else to help them better understand why you took the break in the first place but like i said earlier if you took the break to just escape and basically you sit around moping around watching netflix every day then you are going to have a really hard time trying to explain what you were doing during the time. And honestly, how are you like adding value? How can, whether you can still even add value? And this will be really, really important questions to tackle. Yeah, to tackle in your resume, right? your CV, your interview as well. So purpose is really important. So get clear on the purpose of taking that career break. And once you know that, yep, I have a very definitive purpose, I'm really clear on why I'm doing it versus, no, I'm just trying to

Starting point is 00:11:58 escape because I don't know what else to do, then hopefully this gives you a bit more clarity on how you can really prepare yourself and do not just make the full use of your career break but also prep yourself mentally and from a skill set point of view to actually return back into the corporate world into your career whenever you're ready so with that I hope that you found today's episode insightful. I think that a lot of people talk about like resume gaps and career break, but nobody really talks about like how, what they should be doing and really how to get back into corporate.

Starting point is 00:12:34 And I think that's really an important topic to really ponder on if you feel like you are, you want to embark on a career break sometime soon. So with that, I hope you enjoyed today's episode and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep87: Should I take a career break? What happens.

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