Returning to work - feeling deflated.

[Mammaraspberry]

Just that really, trying to return to employment after 10 years of being a stay at home mum.

I have applied for quite a lot of jobs now and haven’t been able to get an interview for any of them, nor any feedback.

I have a degree, PGCE and lots of work experience. Feeling like I am too old to retrain and ideally need to be part time only 🤦🏻‍♀️

sigh

If you want to work in a school, can you volunteer for a couple of days a week? Obviously, that won’t work if you need to earn money now. However, after volunteering in a school, you’d be in a better position to apply for a TA role.

Thank you. I am in the very fortunate position that I could just stay at home if I wanted to but I want to work. Volunteering is an option. I do a lot of volunteering for my kids school via the PTA. I think I need to look into any updated training I might need to do too.

That sounds a good idea. Volunteering via the PTA is good, but spending a couple of days a week in a classroom can be quite different. It wouldn’t even need to be at your children’s school. It gives you experience of working in a classroom that is usually asked for in TA roles.
Volunteering for a charity can sometimes lead to work too.
Were you a primary or secondary teacher? There seem to be jobs for online tutors for many secondary subjects although you’d have to get up to speed with the syllabus.

What kind of roles are you applying for?

And how part time are you wanting? E.g. 4 days per week is very different to 2 days per week or school hours etc.

Learning mentor, student support, volunteer coordinator, learning coordinator and some more similar roles.

Regards the part time amount, ideally 3/4 days per week. My husbands job is somewhat unpredictable so I need to be available for sorting stuff with the kids. I worked in Further Education.

You mentioned that you have a PGCE and lots of work experience - was that as a teacher? As in, do you have QTS?

I am not sure if your job search so far has been in schools and colleges or if you have already looked wider, so apologies if I repeat things you've explored already.

A 10 year break is a long time, so I think showing you have taken steps to bring your knowledge and skills up to date would help. As I am sure you appreciate, a lot has changed in teaching/training/L&D in the last 10 years - that's accelerated over the last few years with AI. Maybe you could look more widely at L&D roles and consider LPI or CIPD for training. A few times per year LPI offers some relatively short courses leading to certification, eg in designing online training or delivering online training. (Even if that's not exactly what you want to do for work, it will give some transferable knowledge/skills and cut through with employers - I've seen civil service jobs listing LPI quals as meeting their criteria for more general L&D roles.)

Have you looked at any of the professional training organisations, eg BPP, Kaplan etc? They sometimes have roles for supervising apprentices and general learning support or admin. E.g:

https://kaplan-international.hirehive.com/

Would you consider HR or L&D in a business? Or local government or the civil service? Those are places with various opportunities for trainers, coordinators, etc. That also gives you a much larger pool of employers.

You might need to start in a junior/administrative type role to get more recent experience, but you could then work up and into other roles. The advantage you have here is that if you don't need to be working, that presumably means you can afford to work your way back into the field or an adjacent one. Treat it as a long game.

These are the LPI certificates I mentioned I had seen in a civil service L&D job advert as meeting their criteria:

https://www.thelpi.org/certificate-in-designing-online-learning-cdol/

https://www.thelpi.org/certified-online-learning-facilitator-colf/

There may be other more suitable options for you of course.

Thank you, that is all really helpful. I will go and have a look at the links you have sent over.

Not QTS as I didn’t need that for teaching FE. I don’t wish to actually teach within Primary or Secondary so I wouldn’t consider the training to get QTS worthwhile.

You are right, 10 years is a long time. I now really wish I had gone back sooner but practically it wasn’t really possible. However, I have been volunteering and undertaking some freelance work for a considerable portion of that time.

I would definitely consider HR and L&D, but not just purely Admin roles. I would also likely be overqualified for a lot of them, this has been an issue previously.

I will go and look at those links now, thank you again.