This is part 3 of a series of posts by Sandra Russell on how to get back to work after divorce. You can read part 1 – Why Stay-At-Home Parents Are Advised To Go Back To Work After Divorce and part 2 here – How To Find Your Preferred Working Pattern.
Head of
Graysons’ Family Team
Freelance: If you have skills that are in demand, try approaching past employers, or asking friends and family if their employers are in need of freelancers to handle overflow, or have skills gaps that you could fill.
There are also a huge number of freelance job boards out there for you to tap into.
If these avenues turn up nothing, why not think of networking at local events and council-funded employer events? A great source could be your local Chamber of Commerce.
Check out your local council website for information on business advice. Since you’ll be self-employed as a freelancer, much advice for sole traders can be applied to you and your business growth, including how to source clients and build professional networks.
Never forget to use LinkedIn, either!
Part-time: A number of specialist job boards and recruitment agencies have sprung up to cater for part-time jobseekers. Our pick of the bunch are:
Increasingly, regular job sites are becoming more useful if you’re looking for a flexible position. You can either search within the part-time category, or use it as an extra keyword to search for matching jobs in your industry and location.
It’s also handy to set up job alerts for the part-time sections on each job website, which will then send you an automated email every time a new role comes up that meets your criteria. Indeed is an excellent tool for this – as a major jobs aggregator, it pulls in jobs from many other advertisers.
Term-time: With the education sector being your best option for a term-time job, try these:
Do you Need to Retrain to find Family-friendly Work?
Going through a divorce goes hand in hand with rediscovering yourself again. This may mean deciding on a new career path. Were you unhappy when you were last working, or have you discovered a new passion that you’d like to explore? Now is the time to forge the new you, especially if that means finding a different working path.
Think about ways you could combine skills from your previous career, or your interests, with a new job that suits you as a single parent. Not sure what job to do? Try out some career quizzes to uncover where your strengths and interests lie.
If you’ve found that you want to change direction for work, but you’re not sure what to do to get into that new job, check out the National Careers Advice site.
It has detailed profiles of hundreds of different job types, from the salary you can expect, to the qualifications you’ll need and where to find the right training courses in your area – and even if there’s funding available to you. There’s useful tools like a skills health checker, an action planner and CV builder.
About Sandra Russell
Sandra heads Graysons’ family team. She qualified as a solicitor in April 1994, having obtained her law degree at Sheffield University. She has specialised exclusively in family law ever since.
She is personally recommended in the Legal 500 2015 as being ‘committed, focused and confident’.
Sandra became a Resolution accredited specialist in January 2000 and qualified as a collaborative family lawyer in April 2009. Her accredited areas are advanced complex financial and property matters and domestic abuse.
Sandra is passionate about helping couples to resolve their disputes in a non-adversarial, respectful manner; focusing on the needs of their children and re-enforcing the importance of conflict avoidance. She finds collaborative work particularly rewarding in guiding clients through their individual separation journeys so they can look towards a brighter future.