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Professional Development Paths & People

After the Gap: The Professionals Who Stepped Away and What It Actually Costs to Come Back

9 min read
Olivia Bennett
Olivia Bennett Leadership Development Expert & Work-Life Balance Advocate

Carol Fishman Cohen had a career that most finance professionals would have recognized as straightforwardly successful.

Drexel Burnham Lambert. Then Bain & Company. The kind of ascent that reads, in institutional language, as competence confirmed at each stage. And then, at the point where the trajectory might have continued climbing, she stopped. For eleven years, she raised four children, stepped back from professional life entirely, and did what millions of people before and after her have done: she lived outside the workforce long enough for the workforce to lose track of her.

When she eventually decided to return, she discovered what those millions of people also discover — that the professional world she had left had no clear pathway to let her back in. She was not unqualified. She was, in the original sense, overqualified: too much accumulated experience, too significant an absence, and no ready category in the systems that processed candidates for translating either into an opportunity.

She eventually secured a financial analyst role at Bain Capital through the kind of relentless, personal networking that works only when serious credentials are already behind you. The experience stayed with her. She co-wrote a book about it. She gave a talk about it at TED that has now been watched nearly 3.8 million times and translated into thirty languages. And she co-founded iRelaunch — an organization that now has a community of more than 125,000 professionals and partners with over 350 employers to build what the industry calls returnship programs.

“A career break,” she told her TED audience, “is not the end. It’s a pause — and pauses can be read.”

That idea is quietly reshaping how some of the world’s most competitive employers think about talent.

A professional woman in her forties standing at the threshold of a tall institutional doorway, one side in warm domestic shadow and one side in clear morning professional light, her posture composed and deliberate, a folder under her arm, facing forward
The return is not a confession. It is a continuation.

The Scale of the Hidden Workforce
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Cohen’s story sounds exceptional. The data says it isn’t.

Nearly half of all US workers report having taken a career break at some point in their professional lives. In the UK, the numbers land with a sharper weight: the Career Returners Indicator 2025, the annual research study by the specialist organisation Career Returners, estimates that 550,000 professional women are currently on extended career breaks for caring reasons, with 420,000 of them wanting to return. The UK’s Recruitment and Employment Confederation estimates that the failure to reintegrate these professionals costs the economy £39 billion annually in unrealised labour — an economic argument, not a compassionate one.

LinkedIn, for its part, moved quietly to acknowledge this reality when it introduced a career break profile feature allowing members to describe their time away from the workforce in thirteen defined categories: full-time parenting, caregiving, health, bereavement, professional development, relocation, and others. The research behind the feature found that nearly two-thirds of global workers had taken some form of career break. Among women, 68% said they wanted a positive way to represent that time on a professional profile.

That feature was a cultural signal — an institutional acknowledgement that the gap has become ordinary enough to warrant its own vocabulary. What it has not yet changed is what happens when a resume with one of those gaps enters a hiring queue.

The Algorithm Answers First
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The most underreported fact about career re-entry is structural, not personal.

Before a hiring manager reads a resume, an applicant tracking system has usually already made its own decision. The Career Returners Indicator 2025 cites UK Recruitment and Employment Confederation research establishing that recent professional experience within the past twelve months is among the top two factors automated systems use to screen CVs. A gap on a resume is not simply noticed — in many pipelines, it is a filter.

The HiredKit guide to returnship programmes, published in August 2025, draws on research from Harvard Business School and Career Returners to put a specific figure on it: between 43 and 48 percent of ATS systems used by employers in the US, UK, and Germany automatically screen out candidates with gaps of six months or more. This happens before human review. It happens regardless of the candidate’s qualifications, the nature of the gap, or the depth of their prior experience.

The human consequence is documented with unusual precision in the Career Returners research: 94% of returning professionals find it challenging to secure a professional role after a break. 69% describe the experience as “extremely challenging.” 40% name recruitment bias against their CV gap as the greatest single barrier. And 27% have applied for fifty or more roles before finding success.

These are not people who lack capability. They are people who have no available category in the system that processes them.

What Returnship Programs Actually Do
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The returnship — a structured, paid programme specifically designed to bring experienced professionals back to work after a career gap — is not a new concept. Goldman Sachs ran the first formal version in 2008. But the model has accelerated in the years since, particularly after the pandemic period forced a broader reckoning with workforce flexibility and the meaning of the resume gap.

As of 2026, more than 110 companies run formal returnship programmes, according to updated figures published in May 2026 by The Interview Guys. More than 30% of Fortune 50 companies now offer them. Carol Fishman Cohen’s iRelaunch works with over 350 employer clients. Path Forward operates a dedicated programme matcher connecting returners with openings across dozens of companies.

What these programmes share is a deliberate inversion of standard hiring logic. Instead of treating the gap as a disqualifying signal, they treat it as a selection criterion. Instead of asking why the candidate was away, they ask what the candidate could offer now — and fund a 12-to-16-week paid working experience to find out.

The conversion numbers are striking. Cohen’s foundational Harvard Business Review article, “Return to Work Programs Come of Age”, published in September 2021 and still widely cited, documents the pattern that has held across organisations and years: over 80% of returnship participants convert to full-time roles at the conclusion of their programmes, with 90% remaining at their companies for at least two years. Goldman Sachs reports that returnship graduates regularly move into managing director roles within five years.

Cohen’s framing is worth sitting with: these programmes are not charity. They are talent pipelines that outperform the standard recruitment model on both conversion and retention. The question is not why they work. It is why only 12% of the Fortune 500 have built them.

The Double Weight
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The systemic argument is the easier one to make. The psychological one is harder to name, and harder to solve.

The Career Returners Indicator 2025 describes what it calls a “double-whammy” for returning professionals: not only the direct bias against their CV gap, but a pervasive loss of professional confidence that makes navigating that bias significantly more difficult. The two effects compound. The bias makes re-entry difficult; the difficulty deepens the confidence deficit; and diminished confidence affects how returners present themselves, in ways that can inadvertently confirm the bias that created the problem.

The professionals I have worked with who have navigated this describe the internal experience with a precision that still surprises me. They do not say “I was not good at the job.” They say something quieter and more precise: “I forgot what good felt like.” They had been away long enough that the muscle memory of professional confidence — the calm, bodily certainty that you can walk into a room and contribute — had quietly atrophied. Not through failure. Through ordinary time and distance.

Cohen addresses this directly in her TED talk. Her prescription is specific: own the gap. Do not apologize for it, minimize it, or paper over it with carefully arranged dates on a CV. Tell the story of the break with integrity — because it had integrity — and then tell the story of the return as something chosen, with intention. “The relauncher,” she argues, is not an apology for an absence. It is a description of what comes next.

The professionals who navigate re-entry most effectively are not the ones who get the luck of a sympathetic recruiter. They are the ones who have resolved the internal argument before they walk through the door.

What I Know From the Inside
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My own departure from corporate life was not planned. It was a hospital bed and the enforced stillness that followed — the event I have described elsewhere as the thing that arrived instead of the next promotion.

I was not away for eleven years. I was away for something much shorter. And even so, when I began to re-emerge professionally, I encountered something I had not expected: the gap between who I had been and who I now was felt vast, even when it objectively was not. The knowledge had not left. The language for presenting it — the reflexive confidence, the casual certainty of belonging — had dimmed in the interim, and dimmed in ways I had not anticipated.

What rebuilt it was not speed. It was not the fastest possible return to full professional volume, the rush back into the same rooms, the same pace, the same performance. It was something more patient: contribution in smaller settings that let me verify my own capability before claiming it in larger ones. Each professional encounter that went well added something to a store I had been convinced was depleted.

What I have learned from working with professionals who have made this journey — many on timescales far longer than mine, carrying far heavier reasons for the break — is that the confidence deficit is real and it is not a personal failing. It is the rational response to a workforce that tells you, through its systems and its silence, that absence is suspect. The question is not whether the deficit exists. It is how quickly you can distinguish it from the truth about your own capability.

Cohen spent years studying that distinction from the inside, too. And then she built the infrastructure that thousands of others are now walking through.

The gap on the resume is not the problem.

The problem is the system that reads it as one. And that system, slowly but with growing momentum, is finally being built around.

References
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#career break #returnship #career re-entry #workforce re-entry #career gap