Joe Fuller: Carol Fishman Cohen, Harvard Business School class of 1985, has enjoyed a successful career in finance, manufacturing, and consulting—not unusual for an HBS alum. What sets her apart is that she spent the 1990s out of the full-time workforce before re-entering her chosen field. This was a rare feat at a time when the industry generally didn’t accommodate such transitions. The mother of four leveraged that experience to cofound the consulting firm iRelaunch. It focuses on professionals looking to return to work after time away and employers looking to draw on that talent pool.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast. I’m Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Joe Fuller. In this episode I’ll speak to Carol about her experience and what it means to come back from a career break in today’s economy. Who are would-be returners? What barriers do they face? And how should employers design program that help them overcome them? What opportunities does the gig economy offer t hose seeking to reenter the workforce? According to one survey, roughly eight in 10 millennials expect to take time out during their careers. That suggests re-entry will become more the norm than the exception. Carol, welcome back to Harvard Business School and to our Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Thanks for having me, Joe.

Fuller: Carol, can you define what a career break is? That’s not a term that’s going to be universally familiar to our listeners. Who takes them? Why do people take them? How long do they last? What are the implications?

Fishman Cohen: Typically, people think of career breaks in connection with women who take career breaks for childcare reasons, and that’s traditionally how we’ve looked at it. But over time, we’ve seen this broaden, and we’re not just talking about a maternity leave. We’re talking about a multiyear career break. Over time, we’ve seen men taking career breaks for childcare reasons also, and men and women taking career breaks for reasons that have nothing to do with childcare. It could be eldercare or pursuing a personal interest or a personal health issue. But typically, it’s a period of time lasting from one to over 20 years.

Fuller: Now, you yourself are someone who took a career break. Could you just share that story with us and how that engaged your interest on this topic?

Fishman Cohen: So, I feel like I lived this before I started working on this. I am an HBS alum, class of ’85. I had worked in investment management before business school, and then when I graduated, I did a quick stint in manufacturing but I ended up back in the Boston Corporate Finance group of Drexel Burnham Lambert as a financial analyst, and I was working there in the late ’80s, and on maternity leave in February of 1990 when Drexel collapsed.

That began my career break. I didn’t have a company to return to, and I decided not to go looking for the next big job. I knew we wanted to have more kids. We had three more kids in the next few years, and I was home with those kids for 11 years. Then, way back in 2001, before anyone was talking about this—there were no programs or media focus on this whole topic of career breaks or returning to work after career breaks—I returned to work at Bain Capital in their high-yield debt management group, which now is known as Bain Capital Credit, in part because there were ex-Drexel people there who remembered me from 11 years before.

I was there for about a year. I decided to leave there and got a book contract to coauthor a book about returning to work after a career break. It was really the guidebook [Back on the Career Track] that my coauthor, Vivian Steir Rabin, who was also an HBS grad, the guidebook that the two of us wish that we had. We did the research for that pre-recession, in 2004–2005. The book came out in 2007, and at that time, we also created iRelaunch because we were starting to get all these inbound requests from companies and universities to help them create return-to-work programs and present in them.

Fuller: As you said, this is the type of guide you wish you’d had. What are the five or six things—the key takeaways—for someone who wants to relaunch that you’ve teased out in that guide?

Fishman Cohen: Probably the most important one is you have to figure out what you want to do all over again. So you have to determine whether your interests and skills have changed or have not changed while you’ve been on a career break. And the longer you’ve been out, the more important this is. You might decide that you’re on the right career path to begin with, and you’re going to go back to exactly what you left, or maybe something related to what you were doing before but not exactly the same thing. Then there are those of us who step back and reflect and realize we were not on the right career path to begin with and we end up relaunching in an entirely new direction. Of course, depending on what you decide, you are probably going to have to do some updating—and if you’re in a highly technical field, even more so. And it could be formal course work or certificate programs or something that you can learn through a volunteer opportunity. Strategic volunteering is another step that’s really important, so people can get volunteer experience that is in line with their career goals. But one of the other really important steps is to go public with your job search. You have to get out of the house, start to have conversations, not only with people who you run into during the course of your daily life, but also people that you may meet in new networks. So maybe you start going to Toastmasters and learn how to become a better public speaker, and the other people there are people who are working. Or you go to university lecture series and talk to the person sitting next to you, or ultimately you go to talk to the speaker because they’re speaking about something relevant.

Fuller: So this goes beyond the classic definition of networking, which is you ping your former colleagues and friends from school or people you were intimately involved with in the business world. It’s that, plus trying to expand the network even more broadly by design.

Fishman Cohen: Yes, this is not just a typical job search. So you have to go through all the steps you might take on a typical job search, with updating your resume and practicing for interviews—and we can talk about tricky interview questions that relaunchers gets asked—but yes, in addition to those pieces, you have to take additional steps. This is not like a regular job search. And a piece of it is, you need to build your confidence back up again, because if you’ve been on extended leave and professionally disconnected, you may start to feel a diminished sense of self over time. And part of the relaunch process is reconnecting professionally and getting your confidence back and feeling like you’re really ready to be in the game again. And not only recruiting, but, of course, once you’re on the job.

Fuller: That loss of confidence and maybe state-of-the-art aptitude relative to the position you had sound like pretty big obstacles. What are some of the other obstacles people face?

Fishman Cohen: Well, we do say people need to become subject-matter experts all over again. A part of that is getting back in touch with people from the past and learning who are the experts in your field now and what blogs and podcasts and books and articles are they reading. You’re reconnecting with people from the past after a long period of time. You have to understand that those people from the past, they don’t know anything about your diminished sense of self or your loss of confidence. They only remember you as you were.

Fuller: Kind of caught in amber.

Fishman Cohen: They have this frozen-in-time view of you and they are likely to be very enthusiastic about your interest in returning to work, so it’s great to reconnect with these people. And along those lines, talking about outreach and different steps you should take, go to your reunions. Here I just spoke recently at HBS at reunions about the topic of returning to work after a career break, and I encourage people who are on a career break to come to their reunions, even if they feel like they “having nothing to report in the career department.”

Fuller: What about companies? In 2001, you came back, you wrote the book. There wasn’t a language system around this. It wasn’t recognized as a phenomenon. How are companies responding to this available pool of talent, and how receptive are they to trying to create a receptor for these candidates to come back into the workplace?

Fishman Cohen: Right. So you’re hitting on what’s become a pretty notable evolution in employer response to people who are on a career break. Way back in 2012, I wrote an article for Harvard Business Review called “The 40-Year-Old Intern.” It was about what I was starting to see evolving on the corporate side in terms of how companies were looking to engage with this pool of people who were returning from career breaks, because it’s a very high-caliber pool. In 2008, Goldman Sachs started the very first what’s called a ‘returnship’ program, which is very similar to a college-level summer internship except tweaked for the mid-career professional. They’re part of a cohort that moves through the process together. There’s an orientation at the beginning and then ongoing programming. Then at the end, some of them get jobs. That’s the basic concept. So Goldman was the pioneer there in 2008, and in 2013 we saw J.P. Morgan launch the second formal corporate return-to-work program called ReEntry, which they still run these programs today. And in 2014, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and MetLife started similar programs. So we had these five corporate return-to-work programs on Wall Street or in financial services, and we felt like, “Wow! All of a sudden, this is a milestone.”

Fuller: It’s happening.

Fishman Cohen: There’s a critical mass here. If you think about why Wall Street was the leader, or was the leader—now there’s a lot more activity across the industry sectors in this area—it’s because those companies are so old. If you think about them going through generation after generation of employees going through life stages, women were leaving at every stage, and suddenly there became this sense of urgency around, “We don’t have enough women in mid- to senior-level roles. How are we going to connect with a pool of women we can come in at the mid-level or higher and then be in a position to move up?”

Fuller: So it’s motivated primarily by empowerment and gender issues?

Fishman Cohen: Initially. We usually see these programs come out of diversity or human resources with a focus on gender issues, but over time, even the most skeptical managers will see who’s coming in the door as part of these programs, and then they’ll start to expand across business units. And even skeptical managers will get involved and say, “I would like to have a relauncher in my department, too.” We’ve seen this happen over and over again, in finance, in particular, and also in technology. Lots of companies are starting return-to-work programs of all different kinds, most of which involve a mid-career internship. And the results we’re getting from these programs are stunning. The Wall Street programs that we’ve been following for years now have 50 percent to over 90 percent of a “conversion rate.” That means that percentage of people who are in the program gets hired when the programs completes. We at iRelaunch work very closely with the Society of Women Engineers on an initiative called the STEM Re-Entry Task Force, and we now have 25 global companies involved in that effort.

Fuller: So, Carol, we’ve had, now, the better part of 10 years of these programs going back to when Goldman started. What do we know about what makes for a successful program? What does a company have to do to make one of these things work well?

Fishman Cohen: We believe that the ideal model is for every company to create its own unique program, just like they have their own entry-level college internship program. That means that they have to determine what the parameters are for that program that works best for them. So how long does a program last? What time of year does it run? What geographic locations are going to be involved? Which managers and business units? And how many people are they going to start out with, initially? Usually, companies are so committed to the concept, even at the pilot stage, that they name the program and they set up a special landing page for it, and that becomes the hub of all the activity that goes on with the program.

Fuller: Are there four or five design attributes that are consistently correlated with success—things a company has to build into the program, irrespective of the industry, the background, locations that you recommend or you’ve observed or are big contributors to positive outcome?

Fishman Cohen: Most of the programs run 12 to 16 weeks, although they can run anywhere from eight weeks to six months. I should note that they’re all paid, and the programs that we’ve seen be most successful are the ones that use actual roles that are open when the program starts, as opposed to having people do a project in an area where they anticipate open roles to be available in the future. Now, both models have worked, but we think that the model where a person comes in and is in that same role that they would be in if they’re successful, and then on a Friday, they end as an intern, and on Monday, they start as an employee …

Fuller: They get the job.

Fishman Cohen: … we’ve seen a lot of success with that model.

Fuller: Any hypotheses as to why that’s the case?

Fishman Cohen: Well, usually because sometimes the company can’t predict that accurately where open headcount is going to be. If they’re doing projects, then that means at the end of the internship, there is a new matching period that has to occur between the people who are in the pool who have been successful and what’s available in the company. Now, we have seen some companies extend the internship or move those candidates into contract roles if they’re anticipating that those roles are going to open up, but just not right at that moment. We tell companies, “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” They can pull in successful modules from their college-level internship or their regular employee on-boarding, but then include specific modules that are unique and appropriate for relaunchers, as well. Usually, each person is assigned a buddy—a tech buddy or a mentor—who are special contact people for them as they transition through. The idea that they come through the program as a cohort is really important.

I actually wrote an article [“For Professionals Returning to Work, There’s Power in the Cohort”] for Harvard Business Review on this—the power of the cohort in career re-entry programming—because the people who are in this program are usually unlike anyone else in the company. The people in the program provide significant support for each other, both, on the personal and professional side. The idea that they move through the program together, they have opportunities to have lunch together, or if they’re in different locations, even through video conference periodic meetings, plus periodic professional development courses.

Fuller: Maybe you could take one or two examples of companies and walk us through the elements of a relaunch program.

Fishman Cohen: Let’s talk about IBM Tech Re-entry. That program started April of 2016. It was one of the inaugural members of the STEM Re-Entry Task Force that we run with the Society of Women Engineers. The program focused, initially, on data scientists and some cybersecurity roles that were inside IBM in different locations, a 12-week paid program. After the pilot, they decided it was so successful, that they were going to expand it. So they’ve run numerous cohorts since then. They now run in seven states, three Canadian provinces. They launched the program in India. They’re launching it in two other countries now. They’re building the program now across the organization. And that’s what we want to see over time, is that the program and the concept gets embedded across the organization, just like college-level internship programs do. So that’s a good example. Johnson & Johnson, the Re-Ignite program, started very small with three people in their pilot in Cincinnati. Now, they have a dedicated program manager, and they are bringing that program enterprise-wide, as is Raytheon, is also bringing their program enterprise-wide. Another one, United Technologies, a 16-week paid program, started out in a technical area, now includes finance and supply chain and other areas of the company. And that is another program where multiple cohorts have been run, and it now runs in multiple locations across the US and they’re launching in India.

Fuller: So it sounds like this is morphing a little bit from a way to revisit diversity in middle-level management and above to actually being more integral to the hiring strategy of these companies—that it’s becoming a core part of their management of their talent pipeline. Is that fair to say?

Fishman Cohen: It has really broadened, and now, not only are relaunchers defined as people who take career breaks for childcare or eldercare reasons, but it could include retirees un-retiring, or veterans, or military spouses transitioning to civilian roles, or ex-pats repatriating after years abroad as a trailing spouse or partner. This whole concept of using an internship-like experience to engage with a non-traditional pool is part of what’s catching on here.

Initially, the companies were experimenting with this idea of using an internship because they were attaching risk to hiring people who were coming off a multiyear career break. The internship lowers that perceived risk because it allows the company to have this trying-out period before they have to make the hiring decision. But we’ve seen an interesting development just in the last year that there are a couple of programs. Ford’s Re-Entry Program and UBS Career Comebacks program that started as internships, and now they’re evolving into, what we call, direct-hire programs. They’re doing away with the internship. I recently spoke with the person in charge of Ford’s program, and they said, “It’s because we have such high conversion rates from this program that we don’t think it’s that risky anymore. So we want to hire people directly. We want to still give them some transitional support with this programming and mentoring during the first year, but we don’t have the internship piece anymore.”

When we think about, what is the future going to look like in terms of these programs, we have certainly seen a proliferation of mid-career internship programs—or “returnships”—just over the last couple of years. Thirty-eight of them launched between 2016 and 2018. So we’ve really seen this explosion, and we’re expecting that to continue. We are also expecting to see some programs come right out of the gate as direct-hire programs without an internship—like, for example, Dell’s restart program, also part of our task force, started right away as a direct-hire program. We expect to see more of those, as well.

Fuller: What about the other side of the coin? Are there companies that are talking to people that anticipate going on a career break or have come to the company and say, “I’m going to go on break,” and laying the groundwork to have them come back or keep them engaged in some way while they’re on break?

Fishman Cohen: It’s an interesting point you bring up, because if we look at studies of millennials—so younger employees, for example, Manpower Group did a study that came out in late 2016 about millennials, and it showed that 84 percent of millennials were anticipating a career break in the future. Now, they defined it as four weeks or longer, but when we got deeper into their data, when you look to see the reasons for why people were saying they might take a future career break, it pointed to the longer multiyear career break in many cases. When companies have a formal return-to-work program, they’re signaling to all of their employee population: They’re signaling to their own alumni, promising alumni who went on career break they can bring them back through this program; through their employees, in general, who have a friend or relative who is on career break or interested in coming back; but they’re also signaling, importantly, to their youngest employees. They’re saying, “Not only do we recognize that people go through different life stages, and maybe, yes, you will take a career break in the future, and we actually have a formal pathway back for you if you make that decision.”

Fuller: Carol, what are the attributes of somebody who ought to be considering a relaunch and someone who’s going to be a strong candidate to relaunch successfully?

Fishman Cohen: So one of the reasons these programs are so interesting to employers is because the pool is so high caliber. If you look at the attributes of relaunchers in general, they are educated. They have great work experience. They’re in a very stable life stage, so think about this. If a company is engaging with a woman who is returning after a career break for childcare reasons, she’s likely to have fewer or no maternity leaves. There are fewer spousal or partner job relocations at this stage of life. Relaunchers have a mature perspective, and they have an energy and enthusiasm about returning to work precisely because they’ve been away from it for a while. I can tell you, when I was in year nine of my 11 year career break, I was chomping at the bit to get back. I had no idea how I was going to do it. It was 1999. I didn’t know a single other person who had relaunched. But I knew that I was really eager to get back to work. And managers will consistently report to us that the relaunchers inject this enthusiasm into their work teams because we’re so excited to be at work.

Fuller: Another thing we’re tracking here at the Managing the Future of Work project is the growth of the gig economy. In the US, the most rapidly growing percentage of gig workers are the highest paid, $100,000 or more in gig earnings. How does that relate to this phenomena? Because it seems in some ways, some of the positions, particularly the project-based internships, the alternative for the company would be to hire a gig worker. And what about gig work as a relaunch point?

Fishman Cohen: I’m really glad you bring this up because as much proliferation as we’re seeing of these programs recently, most companies don’t have them. So we recommend to relaunchers that they suggest some sort of temporary engagement—a special project or a contract consulting role, or even temp work—to get in the door with a company because that gives them the opportunity to show the company a sample of their work. That’s pretty much the premise on which these internship programs are based. So you’re almost doing the same thing. Some people will get hired after a contract role, or some temporary experience. Other people will decide that this is how they want to work. They want to work with a series of contract roles or temporary assignments for an extended period of time. Whatever works for people in terms of what their relaunch goals are, but you can certainly use gig assignments to parlay into a permanent role later on.

Fuller: And the proliferation of platforms that enable that obviously makes that much more accessible to people than it was historically.

Fishman Cohen: Essentially, you can say you’re starting with a gig role with the anticipation that you’re going to be hired afterward. So that would be a strategy where you know you’re not going to have a series of ongoing gigs, but you are using it as a stepping-stone.

Fuller: Carol, what sort of results are companies seeing from these programs, because you’ve alluded to several different benefits they can obtain, whether it’s increasing diversity in the workforce or filling needed roles, getting skilled workers. What are the outcomes?

Fishman Cohen: So we’ve been very encouraged by the consistency and excellent results that we’re seeing from these programs. On Wall Street, 50 percent to over 90 percent of the people who participate in the formal Wall Street return-to-work programs are getting hired. With the companies that are in the STEM Re-Entry Task Force, with the Society of Women Engineers, we track a lot of detail in those programs. We’ve had 25 companies join the task force. Nineteen of them have launched programs so far, and to date, 85 percent of the almost 400 participants in task force company programs have been hired. So we think these results are stunning and contribute to why there is a proliferation of these programs happening in corporations.

Fuller: Carol, thanks for coming back to Harvard Business School and helping us understand this new phenomenon of relaunches and how it’s becoming another tool in the arsenal of companies trying to maintain a strong talent base.

Fishman Cohen: Great to be here. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about it.

Fuller: From Harvard Business School, I’m Professor Joe Fuller. Thanks for joining us for the Managing the Future of Work podcast.