How to Restart Your Career After Motherhood

I’ve never regretted my decision to have children. Motherhood has been tough and demanding, yet I have loved every day of it. But I didn’t love what it did to my career.

Before I became a mom, I had a budding career as a tax accountant. In February 2004, I received a promotion – my third in six months – and began managing the entire payroll department of the upscale staffing service where I worked. Two weeks later, I discovered I was pregnant.

After looking into daycare rates in our city, we realized that it made no financial sense for me to continue working after our child was born. So I opted to become a stay-at-home mom. And that’s what I remained for the next several years.

Once we had our last child, I started thinking about returning to the workforce. But my resume had an eight-year gap and I had no recent job experience or training to land something new. Worse, I didn’t know what I wanted to do or how to get started finding it out.

Over time, though, I discovered how to reboot my post-motherhood career. And now, I’m working at a job I love, on a schedule that works for me, and still staying at home with my children! If you’re wondering how to restart your career after motherhood, these three tips are a simple way to begin.

Photo by Daxiao_Productions / depositphotos

How to Restart Your Career After Motherhood

1. Find your passion. Being a mother places an extreme demand on your time. That means that you won’t have the time you had before to pursue a brand new field. What will make up for that time crunch?

Passion. If you are truly passionate about what you are pursuing, you’ll stick with it, even when you’re exhausted or under pressure. How do you find your passion?

Think: What gets you excited? What topics do you read about or talk about the most? What do you look forward to doing each day? Those are good starting points for finding your passion. And once you’ve found your passion, you can start choosing a potential career field.

2. Research the market. Once you’ve found the sector you’d like to work in, dig a bit deeper. What does it take to be successful in that field? Does the amount of time and effort required fit with the lifestyle you want to live?

For example, I wanted to return to my first love: writing. But I also wanted to stay at home and continue homeschooling my kids. Obviously, becoming an English professor was not in the cards, because of the rigor of attending graduate school. So I had to adjust my career goals to ones that would fit well with the kind of life I wanted to share with my family.

3. Get an updated education. Many career fields that did not require a college degree in the past now do. And this is where years away from the workforce due to motherhood can really start to show up.

I had been to college in my teens and graduated, but my chosen discipline (Accounting) didn’t fit my new career goal (Writer). Further, a lot of the information I had learned had been updated and revised. I wondered what else I might have missed as I spent the years doting on my kids.

So I went back to college using online distance learning. I completed my English degree and now work from home doing the job I love – writing.

If it hadn’t been for online schooling, I probably wouldn’t have been able to pursue the career I wanted and that’s why schools like Ashworth College are such a great asset for busy mothers.

Can’t find a babysitter? You don’t need one with Ashworth. You can “attend” class right from your home on the computer, using a class schedule that works for you.

Plus, Ashworth is affordable. Compared to similar schools, Ashworth’s tuition costs, on average, five times less. Which means you can graduate debt-free, something I, frankly, wish I would have done.

Whether you’re a mom of many or a mom of one, a veteran mother or a first-timer, it is possible to restart your career after motherhood. If you take the time to find out what you’re passionate about sharing, do your research, and get the kind of education that will prepare you for your next career, you’ll be on your way to a rebooted career you love!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Ashworth College . The opinions and text are all mine.