Your relatively brief period of unemployment has been an eternity.  After an extensive and significant career, you became a statistic: an older worker displaced as a result of this latest and deepest recession.  The art of mastering the online job search (”Old dog learns new trick”), the debilitating process of interviewing, and the resultant rejections have wounded your pride, to say nothing of your self-assurance.  Now, you have accepted an offer of employment, in which you are forced to return to the non-managerial responsibilities you had held eight years ago.  You bite your tongue, give thanks for your good fortune as your peers are still job-hunting, enter your new office environs and feel like an alien who has just dropped in from the stratosphere.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the words of Shirley MacLaine, “Perception is everything.”  To aging parents whose health is failing, a child who chooses career over family can be perceived as uncaring.  To a potential employer seeking an applicant with a consistent work history, a candidate who interrupts his/her career to care for loved ones can appear out of touch with current practices and tools.

Once family obligations have been fulfilled and you prepare for serious reentry into the job market, the solution to the employer’s preconceived notions is to alter those perceptions.  How do you accomplish this?  Depending upon the nature of the position you are seeking, you may be able to demonstrate during an interview that your absence from the workforce did not mean that you allowed valuable skills to lay dormant.
Read the rest of this entry »