7 top tips to boost your career between maternity leaves

How does parental leave affect your career capital?

Taking a long period of parental leave typically means we stop building our career capital because:

• We might scale back our work as we prepare for parental leave.
• Our managers might stop providing us with work to build our career capital while we prepare for parental leave, either consciously to try and help us balance things at work, or subconsciously as they give the work to colleagues who aren’t about to go on leave.
• Stretch work might be reallocated when we return after parental leave if we return part time, our manager thinks we aren’t committed to career development now we are a parent or we are seen to be ‘overwhelmed’ when we return to work.

How to protect your career capital and boost your career?

We can protect our career capital through our parental leave by:

• Keeping stretch work in the run up to leave, and dropping lower level admin work if we are trying to manage our energy levels.
• Using our KIT/SPLIT days while we are on leave to keep up our skills and knowledge.
• Reallocating less senior/admin work after we return from leave if we start to feel overwhelmed / need to manage our energy levels.

When you are back at work after parental leave, if you are thinking of adding to your family further, you may feel like you are in limbo when it comes to your career. You might want to still be engaged in your career, but equally are aware that you may not be back at work that long before you need to go on leave again. So what can you do to help continue to build your career capital / boost your career in the short(ish) time you might have between parental leaves?

Here are our top tips to help you continue to build or boost your career in between maternity leaves:

• Is there a promotion you would like to go for before your next maternity leave, and if so, talk to your Manager about how to go about applying for this.
• Are there any specific skills or experiences you would like to add to your CV to fill any gaps, and if so, what projects or work could help you with this?
• Are there any training courses that you could complete to give your skills a boost, and help you get ready for your next career move?
• Does your company offer any outreach programmes you could be involved in to gain experience and give something back to your local community?
• Are there any publications you could write for to share your expertise and knowledge on your specialist area?
• Are there any events you could speak at to share your expertise and build your reputation in your specialist area?
• Is there any opportunity for you to contribute to your professional association if you belong to one?

What else can you do?

At The Maternity Coach, we have a number of trained Career Coaches who can support you to maxmise your time at work between parental/maternity leaves so get in touch with us today to book a free initial consultation to see how we can help you.