Are “Relaunchers” The New Interns? Rejoining the Marketing Department After a Career Interruption

Not everyone is able to follow a traditional career path. There are a variety of reasons great people sometimes have to interrupt their career: caring for family members (children or aging parents), health crises, moves for a spouse’s career, or even returning to school full-time in order to change to a new career field.

Relaunching isn’t always easy, as Carol Fishman Cohen notes in her TEDTalk. But it can be worth the risk and work, for both the employee looking to jump back into the workplace and the business that hires them.

Cohen says relaunchers should:

• Go public with their job search and start networking.

• Expect to have a lot of conversations that don’t go anywhere. (In other words, don’t let yourself get down when your first few meetings don’t result in a job offer.)

• Reacquaint yourself with the market, new technology and approaches, and brush up on basic office software skills. (Note: This blog is full of information and resources to bring you up to speed on inbound marketing.)

Businesses benefit from employees who are now likely to be at a more stable point in their lives (children are grown, so less time missed caring for them. Relaunchers offer a mature perspective, and because they are relaunching, they have a new energy and enthusiasm for being back in their field.

Are you looking to relaunch a marketing career or considering hiring someone who has been out of the workforce for some time?

Our ebook, Your First 100 Days in Your New Marketing Job, can provide a great blueprint for getting up to speed with the concepts and tasks involved in inbound marketing. It is a great way to utilize a probationary period as Cohen suggests for seeing real work samples and deciding if the position is a good fit for both the relaunching employee and the employer.