A career gap

Question

I had intentionally taken a break from my career for a few years and am trying to return to workforce. In the meanwhile I did some amount of freelancing but not quite a lot. While I get interview calls and do well at the technical front, I am asked this question about if and whether I can sustain a full time job. I have to tell you that I have 9 yrs of work (IT-software) experience before that. I have always tried to keep myself update with technologies and see that during my interviews that the world of software has changed quite a lot. But I am unable to convince my prospective employer about my ability to get back to regular work. Any suggestions? Suggestion to develop a personal project is good, where can I find challenging ideas?

Answer 1

This worked for me, I joined the military during the dotcom bust then 4 years after getting out I worked for 6 months at 50% below competitive salary. Its hard for any employer to pass that up.

Answer 2

I know its tough out there, and its easy to say this when you are employed but if a potential employer is giving you a hard time about taking time off from your carreer for whatever reason, then it may be wise to politely turn down that employer.

Is it valid to question the time off...yes...but it should not prevent you from getting a position.

Answer 3

Honestly, if I were hiring you, I would question that too. If you've been out of the workforce for a while, you'll need a convincing argument that tells your prospective employer that you really want to get back in the game.

Myself, I would probably try to work something out with your employer about having a "trial run" for a couple months below your normal pay grade, so they can see how valuable you are. You might want to talk about personal projects and freelance work too, to demonstrate that you may have taken a break from the workforce, but you weren't out of the programming world.

Answer 4

Try to get interviews with people with public APIs and develope some prototype using that before the interview!

Answer 5

I'd just answer in an honest way.

An interview is a two-way process. If they really can't take that you did some freelancing but no regular work during some period, maybe they're not a good company to work for.

Anyway, I'd never mind about that or any other detail. Be convinced that you can find a regular job. Then, just keep trying. The statistics will work in your favor and you'll get a good one in, what, ten, twenty interviews?

Answer 6

If I were you I would not tell them that I had taken time off. I am not saying lie, but I would dress up the absence as something else which took up all your efforts, and while you may have had a break from tech work, you didn't necessarily have a break from work, per se.

The purpose of this is simply to remove the objection that you may not be able/willing to get back into a regular 9 to 5. I think that just spinning your break slightly differently may do it if you have the requisite tech skills.

Remember, you are selling yourself, and as long as you don't tell outright lies then tailoring your last few years valuable life experience in a way which may be appealing rather than off-putting is just part of your presentation of yourself.

Answer 7

just say you were trying to start you own business. Employers love that!

Answer 8

This is surely a very common situation for a person to be in, especially (and I don't want to be sexist but I imagine this is true) for a woman who may have taken a few years off when children were small.

I haven't been in that situation, but there may be resources (advice, counselling, back-to-work help) that's specialized towards that (on the net, and/or offered by your local government).

Another possibility might be to take some training: like a college course or something. That could give you three things:

• Relevent, recent learning
• Networking opportunities, with people around entering the workforce (guidance counsellors, people who recruit from colleges, etc.)
• An opportunity to say to any doubter, "Look, I just handled some full-time education: that shows I'm serious, and could handle a full-tme job."

Answer 9

What kind of jobs are you applying for though? If you are applying to jobs that require you to know something that has only been out for the past year or two this may be rather hard to get whereas if you are applying for jobs where there are legacy systems that you used to work on then this may go over better. Are you applying to be a developer, tester, administrator, analyst, project manager, or something else?

Answer 10

If the big main concern is that technology has changed since the last time you were in the workforce, I think you'll be able to find ways to bridge the gap on your own. I would set aside a specific amount of time every evening to focus on freshening up your skills. Pick a technology, anything that interests you, and just learn as much as you can. Ideally, you probably want to pick a technology that the majority of the people you are interviewing with would be interested in. I think if you can display what you've done on your own you'll be able to convince an employer to have confidence in what you'll be able to do as his or her employee.

Answer 11

I took a three-year hiatus to get a creative writing degree, so I sympathize with what you're going through. Here's what I did to get back into the market:

• **Study, study, study.** I worked my way through a book on probability, studied algorithms by reading CLRS and working on problems from sites like [TopCoder][1] and [the UVa Online Judge][2].
• **Build something.** Find a project to teach you whatever skills you need to learn. My personal goal is to learn Haskell by writing a database to track submissions to magazines.
• **Network.** When I finally did land a job, it was through a friend. I contracted at way below what I knew I could earn for the first few months.
• **Show enthusiasm**

When I finally did find a job I wanted, I attacked the question of my time off head on. Sure, I had missed a few years, but that was a net plus in terms of my enthusiasm. I pointed out that in the past few months I had built the beginnings of a chess computer; I had optimized a program to merge sort through every word in War and Peace, reducing a five-minute execution time down to under two seconds; I had learned probability and graph theory; and had built several proof-of-concept projects in the newer technologies not yet on my resume. I basically strangled the objection as soon as it formed.

Your interviewers are asking you a dangerous question: "Do you really want to come back to work?" So do you? Because if you do, you'll have to throw yourself into your career enough so that when the question comes up you can pummel it into the ground.

Good luck!