Getting by with a Little Help from Your Friends

Reinvention and discovering opportunity is exactly what smart people do to keep in the game.  It’s what the career changers, laid off, and outsourced do diligently to get employed, and is exactly what smart moms like us should do when thinking about going back to work.

Women invented Networking. Networking may be a business term to secure clients, colleagues, and sales, but it’s what we moms have been doing since the day we first joined playgroup.

Remember this as you consider reentering the workforce in any capacity. The friends you know via your stay-at-home life can substantially assist you when you want to go back to work.

Ask about returning to work.  Then listen carefully. Your network can help you with simple things like whether working friends like their jobs. Whether the commute is killing them. Or if their kids turned to internet porn the moment left alone. And important things too, like if you can still wear those shoes or not. And if you will really be tested on EXCEL proficiency or whether you can you fake it and figure it out later.

Find out who works and where. Keep notes.
It’s been awhile since we held down full-time jobs, but we are certainly not new to this networking concept. Put the bookclubs, bus stops, PTO meetings, parent pick up, and football pre-game rituals to work for you.

Talk to parents on soccer sidelines and find out what they know. Find out who they know.  People love to share what they do and want to help. And word of mouth surpasses anything Monster.com or scary Craigslist jobs will be able to offer.

Tell people that you’re looking. Tell them who you used to be. And share who you are thinking of someday becoming.