Returning To Work on Shine

Hitting the Big Five-O

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Yes, I know the two things a woman is not supposed to reveal are her age or her weight, but I think we’ve been too defensive, especially about age. I just hit the Big Five-oh! and thank God I’m reveling in it. In 1971, when Loving Care came out with “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better,” I couldn’t relate. But now, I couldn’t agree more. So don’t feel your marketability has plummeted just because you’ve hit the Big One. You can make it work for you, or at least keep it from working against you, if you follow these steps.

Two job-hunt success stories, two great strategies

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My iRelaunch co-founder and I recently heard from two acquaintances who landed jobs using some of our favorite strategies. Although their stories are unique, their strategies can be used by almost anyone. Here are their stories and strategies:

Return-to-work lessons from @GeekMommy: Twitter celebrity, computer scientist, and relauncher

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by Carol Fishman Cohen

@GeekMommy, aka Lucretia Pruitt, has over 12,500 followers on Twitter. She is a COBOL expert, a former computer science professor, and she heads up her own social media strategy consulting firm Social Media Matters. She is one of Walmart’s “Eleven Moms,” and corporate giants ranging from Ford to Colgate-Palmolive fly her out to blast reviews of their new products to her vast cyber-network. Of course we met through Twitter!

Lucretia is also a “relauncher” – she took a career break and then returned to work. When Lucretia was pregnant, she and her husband originally thought her husband was going to stay home and she was going to continue teaching Computer Information Services at DeVry University . But when her daughter was born she changed her mind. She decided to be the stay at home parent. Here are the lessons from her instructive and inspiring “relaunch story.”

The amazing Daily Grommet Company: Founded by relauncher Jules Pieri (and she’s hired relaunchers too!)

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One of our favorite relaunchers is Jules Pieri, founder of Daily Grommet, a site you should all check out. Jules is a designer, consumer brand strategist, and social media guru (her last job was President of Ziggs.com). Jules came up with the fabulous idea of starting a company that identifies wonderful products and gives a brief but in-depth look at one “grommet” per day via a short video clip. Click on Daily Grommet’s link above to see today’s offering. Jules also writes one of my all time favorite (and candid and inspiring) blogs. Full disclosure: we are such big fans of Jules that we asked her to be on our Advisory Board at iRelaunch and fortunately for us, she said yes. Jules took a career break after the birth of her third son.

Unlikely jobs in unlikely places

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In this market, the mantra for relaunchers (people returning to work after a career break) and the newly unemployed must be “there are jobs out there – I just have to find them.” Even more important, you may find matches for your skill set or your work schedule preference in the most unlikely places.

Reentering the workforce? Talk up your integrity

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In Friday’s Wall Street Journal former HP Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina wrote “Never have common sense, good judgment and ethics mattered more.” I completely agree with her. In a week that revealed Illinois Governor Blagojevich’s horrifying venality and Wall Street eminence grise Bernard Madoff’s massive fraud, might honesty become valued again? When business was booming, asking questions and raising doubts was not in style. Although employers professed to care about ethics, what they really wanted were employees who would keep the good times rolling. The recruiting mantra from 2004-2007 might be summed up as: “Skeptics and naysayers need not apply.” Now that so many institutions have crumbled, basically due to a lack of questioning and doubt-raising, maybe common sense, good judgment and ethics will come back in vogue. It occurred to me that a renewed interest by business in these old-fashioned values might actually work to the advantage of relaunchers—those who are reentering the workforce after a career break, most often after staying home to raise kids. Now’s the time to emphasize, in a creative way, some of the intangibles that you have to offer.