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.

Without standing out like a sore thumb, you must not only integrate into this new workforce, you must convince your new employer that you are an extremely valuable asset (i.e.: recession-proof).  On this tightrope, you find yourself without a balancing pole … until now.  As career professionals and counselors with more than thirty years of experience, we urge you take the following words to heart, for they will guide you well as you negotiate that high wire. 

Cultivate a fresh perspective.  While it may be tempting to turn your mind to the good old days in the office, the lab, or the production facility, don’t, as it is self-defeating.  If your learning curve involves, for example, a software application completely new and foreign to you, avoid quipping, “Gee, I remember when we did this all manually!”   Such remarks will only brand you as an “old timer” in a cutthroat work force that loves new blood.  Instead, when you return home that evening and for the rest of that work week, spend an hour or so on your PC or Mac where, uninterrupted and unobserved by your colleagues and superiors, you can research a bit more about the software’s features, capabilities, and glitches.  The confidence and knowledge with which you approach the software will show in your attitude and output.

Please stay tuned for Part Two of our series for more beneficial tips, which we will publish shortly. 

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.

Start by listing and reviewing your exact duties in caring for your parents.  Then, assess their value in transitioning these skills to the workplace.  Did you speak with health care providers, serving as interface between physicians of diverse specialties in order to facilitate delivery of the best possible care?  Did you ensure that your parents took the correct medications and dosages at the proper times?  If so, you have demonstrated strong communicative abilities, meticulous follow-up, and a quality-oriented focus.  Did you schedule and/or transport your loved ones to medical appointments or diagnostic tests; did you get them there on time?  “Yes” proves that you possess the organizational and multi-tasking skills that employers appreciate.

Did you monitor your parents’ food supplies and other staples; did you purchase them?  Considering that the odds are high that they are on a fixed, if not restricted income, you must have shopped for the highest quality items at the lowest possible prices.  These abilities attest that you have sound analytical and decision-making skills.

What about your parents’ finances?  If you paid their bills, did their banking, managed their investments, and allocated their spending money, you are good at balancing payables against receivables to assure that financial obligations are met in a timely manner, budgets are maintained, and assets are preserved.

By understanding that your contributions were productive, and by articulating this in an interview, you will turn the interviewer’s negative perceptions into positives.  Considering you resourceful and responsible, he/she will view you as a valuable potential asset to his/her team.