The Career Break Talent Pool

After a long time away - typically two years or more under returner schemes - settling back into a previous career, particularly a people-business such as insurance, can be daunting. Part of the support provided by facilitators such as the one Emma worked with, includes mentoring sessions and follow up calls during the first three months of employment, to ensure that the fit is right, and the candidate is happy.

Return-to-work schemes, which focus on employing people post-career break are still relatively scarce in the insurance industry but are on the rise as candidates seek new ways to re-enter the marketplace and companies learn the value of diversifying recruitment pipelines.

A mutual benefit

From an employer’s perspective, such schemes allow a company to access an experienced workforce from within the sector, or with transferrable skills from another. For candidates looking for employment after a long break, national and local organisations such as Career Returners, Return Hub and Runneth London aggregate lists of companies offering return to work schemes and provide training and resources to achieve success. For Emma, joining the Chaucer scheme and working with a facilitator to get there, restored her confidence and ensured a smooth transition back into work.

Prior to becoming a returner, Emma’s story is fairly typical for the insurance sector. Having graduated with a maths degree and a master’s in engineering she started working as a consultant in pensions. When given the option to move into insurance however, the complexity of exposure analysis appealed to her and she took on this new challenge, moving fully into insurance at AON as a catastrophe modeller. Fifteen years in exposure management followed with stints at JLT Re and Guy Carpenter, during which her first and second children were born.

Career break impacts predominantly affect women

Emma is also typical of the demographic predominantly utilising this kind of scheme. Returners are largely, though not exclusively, women in their thirties and forties who have taken time away from work to raise a family, either voluntarily, or enforced due to the challenges of childcare costs. Other returners may include people who have been away with a prolonged illness or caring responsibilities, but the majority are women aged 25-44.

The lack of women in senior C-suite roles in finance is well documented, and it is apparent that much talent is lost due to this large tranche of women leaving the work force for long periods. This time out can result in career setbacks and a lack of senior-level experience during these years whilst male peers continue to rise through the ranks, and a lack of opportunities to return to original career paths.

For Emma, her first career break arose due to a confluence of circumstances; her husband's job required a family relocation to Warwickshire around the same time that they were expecting their second child in 2011. Having had their first child 14 months prior and returning to work after a year’s maternity leave, Emma was familiar with the strains of going back to work in the City whilst raising an infant, and had to rely heavily on childcare. Being already pregnant with her second child when the relocation arose, the thought of commuting to the City from Warwickshire even a couple of days a week became impossible; she decided to step away full time.

In respect of parents, for many this becomes the key question: Regardless of ambition or desire to keep working, due to childcare costs, sometimes it can be cheaper for one parent to stay at home than to work part time. A recent study showed that 98% of women want to return to work after having a baby, but only 14% feel it is viable for them*. For Emma, in a pre-pandemic world which held a lack of remote opportunities, the distance and cost of childcare became insurmountable factors, so the debate evaporated. Although difficult to contemplate, it became a simple choice to leave the market and focus on family.

Keeping up workplace skills

After two years away, Emma came back to work in May 2013 and remained in the market until 2017, during which time her third child arrived. Now juggling a demanding analytical role with caring for three young children, she felt that neither family nor work were getting the best of her, and the time had come to step away again for a longer period. Ultimately, with the pandemic also impacting on her time off, Emma had four years away from the insurance market, but her second ‘career break’ was far from a break from work. Wanting to keep her skills up to date and her mind occupied whilst her children were at nursery, Emma started her own business selling organic baby clothes working with local manufacturers and managing the finance of the business. Later, she took on an additional role bookkeeping for a local golf club, a role which became significantly more intense as the pandemic hit and she was required to make decisions alongside regarding closure for lockdowns and furloughing staff. Managing three children and two jobs, Emma was busier during this time than during her insurance career, but feels this experience helped keep her mind sharp and her knowledge of the workplace relevant, even if different than her previous career.

By the time her youngest child had gone to school and her secondment had ended, Emma began looking for opportunities back in the market and came across a LinkedIn advertisement for Inclusivity. Although this particular company are no longer trading, other facilitators exist, who spend time getting to know experienced candidates looking for roles and matching them with appropriate employer looking for experienced hires.

Facilitating a good match

In order to be matched, Emma had to be accepted onto the scheme via an interview process with the facilitator before she was put forward to Chaucer. This involved them creating a detailed personal statement on Emma’s behalf covering her background and career break, a discussion with the HR team about her, and of course the normal interview process.

After becoming successful, Emma started at Chaucer on a six-month contract as a research analysis and was offered a permanent position as a property portfolio manager, before being promoted to Portfolio Manager in September 2023.

Says Emma of return-to-work schemes and facilitators,

Opening up a diverse workforce

It’s clear that these initiatives are incredibly valuable, but insufficient for the potential demand based on Emma’s anecdotal evidence and the shortage of females in leadership positions in insurance – only 35% of leadership roles are currently held by women, with 25% at board level.

Now that Emma is a manager of people, she is keen to nurture their careers, create opportunities and enable flexibility so that they can gain as a diverse experience as possible to set them up for the future. As Emma says,

Whilst the problem of the ‘leaking pipeline’ of talent is a real challenge for the industry, fixing it will need companies to be creative with their approaches and make a commitment to enable returners to continue their careers, supporting a more experienced and diverse leadership long term.