Nine years ago, stay-at-home moms Carol Fishman Cohen (top left) and Vivian Steir Rabin (bottom right) faced a common challenge:  after years out of the full time labor force, they both wanted to return to work.  They didn’t know each other at the time, yet they had similar backgrounds in finance and similar outlooks about their prospects.  Namely, they felt incredibly intimidated and wondered who in the world would hire them. Perhaps most importantly, they felt isolated in their quest. This was the year 2000, when “women returning to the workforce” yielded nothing on Google; no media attention, no studies, no formal career reentry programs and no books on the process.
 
Cohen and Rabin ultimately “relaunched” their careers, as they call the process of returning to work after a career break.  Subsequently, they wrote the book they could have desperately used in their own transitions from home to work and founded a company producing career reentry programming. 
 
Although there is now less stigma attached to taking time out of the workforce, women seeking to relaunch their careers (either as Financial Advisors or in other fields) still face roadblocks. We asked Cohen and Rabin, authors of Back on the Career Track: A Guide for Stay-at-Home Moms Who Want to Return to Work, and founders of iRelaunch, to write a series of guest blogs for the Women Financial Advisors Forum.  Here they each trace their journeys back into the work world, and comment on the attractiveness of the Financial Advisor career path for “relaunchers.”

OUR RELAUNCH SUCCESS STORY
By Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin
 
Vivian:  We both started our careers in finance, but we took two very different paths back to work after our career breaks.  I began my career in corporate finance focusing on media companies.  Ultimately, I became CFO of a media company and later HR director of a consulting and publishing firm before taking a seven-year career break to care for my five children.  I “relaunched” by helping my neighbor in his executive search business.  My first two years in the business I earned very little, but I loved the work and knew that it could be more financially rewarding once I was able to bring in my own clients, which I eventually did.  By my fourth year I was so busy I needed to hire someone to help me – another “relaunching” mom of course!

Carol: Early in my career, I was in investment management and then in
corporate finance focusing on high yield debt offerings.  During my 11 years
out of the full time workforce, I spent the first five working part time in
finance positions, for example, writing the annual report for a large
non-profit, and then I left the paid workforce completely to spend six
years at home with my four children.  When I decided I wanted to return to work, I networked extensively with my former colleagues and those to whom they referred me, eventually landing a demanding full time job at an investment management firm in their high yield debt group.

Vivian:  Although I stuck with executive recruiting, I also remained fascinated by the transition from full-time-at-home-motherhood back to work, and puzzled by the lack of books or other resources on the subject.  When I divulged this interest to a high school friend, she introduced me to Carol.  Like me, Carol had felt completely alone and without a game plan when she set out to return to work.  And, like me, she had developed a passion for “relaunching.”  A few months after Carol and I first spoke by phone, she left her investment management position (more on why in a future blog), and became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study on career reentry. We soon decided to collaborate on a book on the subject to help other women navigate the often difficult transition from home back to work. 

Carol:  As part of the research for Back on the Career Track, in addition to relaunchers, we interviewed employers, academics, recruiters, work life experts, career coaches and others.  Prior to the book’s publication, we started getting asked to speak on the career reentry topic and assist in developing career reentry programs at employers and universities.  After a year, we formalized this work by creating our career reentry programming company iRelaunch and developing a number of products: our one day return to work conference called the Career Relaunch Forum, a coaching program called Relaunch Circles, and a webinar series.  We have shared our career reentry strategies with almost 4,500 people at nearly 80 events, nationally and internationally, since 2006.  We are also featured bloggers for Yahoo! Shine, Yahoo’s women’s portal.

In our view, “relaunch success stories” are the most powerful way to communicate successful return to work strategies.  For Back on the Career Track, we collected over 100 such stories, interviewing women from a variety of fields who relaunched their careers in a range of work configurations. We also interviewed inspirational relaunchers such as retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who took five years off early in her career. Our iRelaunch.com homepage features 40 (and counting!) relaunch success stories.  Click on any photo to take a look.

Vivian:  We have always felt the Financial Advisor role to be a great fit for relaunchers.  In the last few years, I personally have met several relaunchers who became Financial Advisors, each with her own unique story about how she found her way into the field.  Regardless of their backgrounds, they all cited their maturity and life experience as enormous assets.  After all, who would you rather buy financial products from, a woman who’s saving for her own kids’ college education or someone just out of college herself? In addition to this natural credibility, relaunchers tend to have highly developed community networks, an eye for detail, and resourcefulness—all key success factors for Financial Advisors. Plus, although it’s a demanding career, Financial Advisors don’t punch a clock.  Good firms emphasize results, not office face time.
 
With these points in mind, we approached Morgan Stanley Smith Barney about becoming an employer sponsor of iRelaunch’s upcoming Career Relaunch Forum on October 29 at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.  We thought this would be a great opportunity for the firm to meet talented women on career break who are thinking about returning to work, as well as giving our 125 high caliber attendees a chance to learn more about the Financial Advisor career path at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.  To our delight, the firm agreed.  So if you live in the tri-State area and are currently on career break, we hope you will join us on October 29th for a day of interactive learning about how to relaunch your career, as well as informal networking with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and other high quality employers. 
 
Whether you’re interested in becoming a Financial Advisor or you’re not sure what your next move will be, we encourage you to take the first step in creating your own relaunch success story.  In our next guest blog, we’ll show you how—through a process we call “The Seven Steps to Relaunch Success."

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