Dear Super Mama,
You don’t need to feel apologetic for the time you have devoted towards your family and children! In the last few years while you have been raising your children you have developed some amazing skills that are highly desirable in today’s workplace. More and more, organisations are recognising how important soft skills are in the workplace and how they differentiate great employees from good ones. The key is knowing how to hack your resume after a long maternity break and how to present your new skill set and experiences to potential employers.
Luckily, you don’t need to spend hours thinking about how to hack your resume, as. I have translated your daily mummy duties (soft skills) into more business oriented phrasing.
Know that words really matter and learn to communicate them in the language of your career choice.
Good luck with your job hunt!
Your Soft Skills Translation into Business Communication
| Time Management & Organisation | Juggled hoursework, kids, shopping, cooking and more.. | Prioritised key tasks and workloads. |
| Daily school run, meal preparation, play dates, organizing birthday parties.. | Highly proficient at working to daily, monthly and weekly deadlines. | |
| Negotiation | Negotiations with children over bed time, toys, clothes, food, sweets… | Able to use strong negotiation skills to achieve desired outcome within deadline constraints. |
| Consider the opinions of children, teachers and other parents and still managed to gain consensus. | Regularly employ highly developed negotiation skills to ensure all points of view are given consideration and all key parties are held accountable to the agreed outcomes. | |
| Communication & Listening Skills | Offer clear instructions and advice to children, child care and mums, written endless lists… | Highly developed verbal and written communication skills. |
| Settled arguments between kids, listened to endless stories and news presentations… | Pay particular attention to key areas of emotional intelligence, including listening and empathy to improve the quality of all key relationships. | |
| Multi Tasking | Playing with kids, booking medical appointments, shopping, answering phone calls, hanging washing more | Prioritize and execute multiple responsibilities at once across a wide variety of tasks. |
| Settle arguments, drive the kids to school… | Simultaneously perform a variety of key tasks within a limited time frame to meet tight deadlines. | |
| Networking & Collaboration | Organise fundraising events, play groups, play dates, mum meet ups, birthday parties… | Developed highly effective relationships to assist in the execution of group tasks and project based team work. |
| Problem Solving | From emergency DIY to helping kids with homework and everything in between… | Easily able to apply a range of problem solving strategies to any difficult situation to ensure the critical steps of evaluation, analysis, solution creation and testing are all employed to ensure the best outcome. |
| Research | Investigated every aspect of your child’s development from vaccination to best schools. | Thorough and effective research and analytical skills making me able to evaluate a wide variety of data and information and draw the necessary conclusions. |
My final tip:
Talk to your local community, school teachers, coaches, friends other mums in influential positions and ask them for a character reference that highlights your skills and commitment.
If you are looking for some additional information I would recommend to read How to Hack your Resume… And Win the Job of Your Dreams. from the Science of People by Vanessa Van Edwards.
If you feel you need an affordable up skill on how to present yourself professional after a long maternity break, or learn a few new tech skills that are indispensable in the modern workplace come and join our weekly meetups on topics that interest you!
Don’t need to hack your CV? Amazing! Do you know anyone who might need some help or inspiration? Please share this blog post with any mama friends who are looking for ways to update their CV after a long break.
Remember if we want our society to thrive we need more women to thrive. That’s why we invest in the success of mums because we know that each woman who succeeds gives back even more to her community and family.
Please do share these stories with others women who are dreaming B.I.G that their dreams deserve their attention too, and that they too can make it.
Isn’t it an incredible gift you can give your mama friends and anyone who your life touches!