Making p/t working not stall career?

[growingweeble]

Please, if anyone has advice on how to maintain a successful high-level career part-time, can you share? My new employers want to make it work but have almost no experience with part time working.

I’ve worked part-time for years and I’ve done just enough to retain a good reputation and have opportunities open to me. But, not achieved what I could/should have and feel I’m always struggling to keep up on restricted work hours.

I’ve just taken on a new much more senior role but am physically and mentally falling apart under the pressure.

The reason I am part time is that I am a sole parent of two kids under ten so have non-negotiable commitments when I’m not working.

Does anyone have advice on what needs to be in place for part-time working to be genuinely successful? It doesn’t just have to be things I do but also things I could ask my employer to think about. I work for a small and very fast growing firm and they want to make working for them a successful option for part time workers. But, I’m their first part time employee and frankly they don’t understand the half of it.

At my previous company they hired 2 pt instead of 1 ft so they share the workload that one person would normally be expected to do. They each worked 3 days a week and used a secure network to share documents (a bit like Google docs) so they could collab on docs and presentations etc

In my experience you need to be brutal with delegating. EVERYTHING that doesn’t need your full level of skill and expertise gets delegated. It’s hard because it feels “precious” to not chip in with the grunt work but they’re paying for your experience so it’s wasteful of their investment to do work that’s beneath you.

And if there’s nobody to delegate to then ask your employer to spend the bit of your salary they’re saving on admin support.

Making sure there is continuity on my non working days has been key for me. (I do 3dpw with two consecutive days off).

So I have a junior person in the same role as me working part time across 5dpw (alongside another assignment for the rest of their time). This means he keeps things moving when I'm not there to push them through, makes the client feel loved (when I was otherwise unavailable) and my team now actually manage to do some work on my days off as someone is checking in and supporting them. I still make the decisions and set the tasks, but that continuity is such a huge weight off my shoulders.

(This arrangement has only been in place for 2 weeks, so can't comment on how it will help my career, but I am so much less stressed and can focus my time on where I can add value such as forward planning and strategizing, when before I was bogged down by 5 days of admin compressed into 3 days of work, as well as feeling like I was spending 1 day handing over and 1 day catching up every week)

It depends on your working pattern and hours. 2 days a week is very different to 4 days a week. 4 hours a day or 6 hours a day.

Communication and managing expectations are important - in terms of colleagues knowing your availability and handing anything over.

I think once a team gets used to it and your working pattern it doesn't seem such a big deal anymore.

Job share worked well for me in a senior role - much more successful than working part time when I always felt I was playing catch up. I was lucky that the job share partnership worked well as we did not know one another before. We had complementary rather than identical skills, were clear about role/responsibilities, lead areas, staff reports etc.

Thanks all. I also did a job share before with someone who worked f/t and had complementary skills to me, ie he could do stuff I was pretty rubbish at but could contribute concretely to areas he couldn't.
Now that is not really an option, which is a shame as that really worked.

Which leaves being brutal and delegating everything I can. As I'm new that might take some time, but I will work on my saying no skills!

I wondered if anyone has successfully communicated the challenges of working p/t? For me, they are the fact that I need to join all the same team catch up meetings, etc... but they take up a greater proportion of my week. Also, managing expectations. I've been in my new job for nearly 2 months but that is more like 1 month when you take on board I'm part-time. For annual reviews etc in my past job I would review everything I had achieved and feel it looked pitiful. Then consider it was more like in 7 months and it looked amazing.

My work pattern is school hours in term time and extra leave to cover the holidays, which over the year amounts to 0.6FTE.