Career-break? Confidence crisis? Direction dilemma? Help is at hand ...
The Back2Work Club™ is a new venture offering, support, workshops and advice to help people get back to doing a job they love. Based in North Oxfordshire, it is running a 2 day course of workshops on 3rd & 13th May at Bloxham Mill Business Centre.
In the last 18 months, larger companies have really started to focus their energies on how to benefit from of all the talent tied up in employees currently away from the workplace, mostly women on maternity leave. ‘Returner Programmes’ and ‘Returnships’ were first developed by the finance industry, then the legal profession and are now gaining momentum within construction, real estate, architecture and telecoms. Mainly London-centric, they are often sector-specific or internally run by companies such as O2, PwC or Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Two of Back2Work Club's directors (Sarah Sheehan & Kate Sturgess) had previously worked together creating a CPD programme for in-house lawyers. Friends for 20 years, they decided they wanted to use their experience to develop generic training & support for anyone who’d been out of work for any length of time, whether due to maternity leave, redundancy, career-break or health issues.
They found that the main stumbling block to people finding a job they loved after time out, was a lack of confidence in themselves and their skills. Teaming up with Justine Cadbury, who’d coincidentally been looking at developing training for barristers returning to the Bar, was a natural step. Several focus groups and numerous trashed Word documents later, the Back2Work Club was born.
Kate Sturgess explains: ‘We’re starting from our stamping grounds of North Oxfordshire and aim to expand geographically from here. We’ll also be running practical workshops on starting your own business and entrepreneurship. There are webinars and online courses available of course but we’re all about face-to-face, on-going networks and support. We’ve witnessed time and time again the energy, positivity and enthusiasm that results when you put a group of like minded people together in a room. They really want to go back to work; they have boundless talent, knowledge and often newfound skills … they just need to have the confidence and know-how to put it all together; to re-discover and then re-launch their professional selves. And that’s where we come in.’
Notes to the Editor
W: www.back2work.club
E: info@back2work.club or kate@back2work.club
T: 0330 088 2113
Directors & co-founders:
Kate Sturgess: Presenter & conference facilitator, will admit to being a TV Fairy Mum in the distant past. And the voice in the former NatWest Tower lift, now known as Tower 42.
Justine Cadbury: Family law barrister, great-granddaughter of George Cadbury. Currently away from the Bar bringing up her children.
Sarah Sheehan: Freelance lawyer whose firm once acted for members of the Sex Pistols. Self-confessed technology geek. A good thing, as the other two aren’t.