Survey: Employers shun workers<br> who take career breaks

Employees trying to re-enter the work force after time away may find their hardest job is persuading employers they haven’t lost their skills, according to a recently released survey.
About 61 percent of managers surveyed by Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business said the most important thing candidates can show is that they kept building expertise during a break. By contrast, only 25 percent of workers ranked the possibility of eroded skills as a top reason for not pursuing time away.
The disconnect suggests that workers who want flexible work schedules or a career break need to do a better job of assuring employers they’ll stay sharp, the consultants who worked on the survey said. Otherwise, managers will continue to view such options with a jaundiced eye.
“Really, that should be the primary thing workers should be concerned about,” Cali Yost, president of Madison, N.J.-based Work+Life Fit Inc., said in a telephone interview. Tuck, located in Hanover, N.H., conducted the survey in association with Yost and Aquent Inc., a marketing and staffing firm in Boston. The results were released May 17.
About a third of hiring managers surveyed said they recruit from the pool of college-educated professionals who’ve been absent from the work force, the report said. About the same number said they recruit among workers who want more flexibility in how and where they do their jobs.
“Companies just haven’t integrated this element of flexibility into their leadership development,” Yost said. “The problem is their formal strategies just haven’t kept pace with the realities of the 24-7 work environment we’re in.”
Employers that want to remain competitive must do a better job of assessing how to balance their needs with the reality that more workers are considering “alternative” career paths because of family obligations or other reasons, Yost said. More than 60 percent of professionals surveyed said they would consider leaving the workplace for a period of time.
The two-part online survey consisted of responses from senior executives who handle hiring or managing employees at 190 firms and from about 500 professionals ages 26 to 60. The report doesn’t provide a margin of error.
The research results will be presented by Tuck’s executive education program during a series of roundtables hosted by San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s biggest maker of computer networking equipment; New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co., the third-biggest U.S. securities firm; and Aquent.