Back To Work Connect turns seven this October; not quite sure how that happened!
Although we launched in October 2019, the work actually started about 18 months earlier. As anyone who has started a business will know, there was a huge amount happening long before anyone ever saw Back To Work Connect. There was market research, conversations with employers and women trying to return to the workforce, meetings with advisors, figuring out how to set up a board for what was then a social enterprise and many, many conversations about raising money, building the platform and how we were actually going to make the whole thing work.
When we finally launched in October 2019, Ireland was close to full employment. There was a growing conversation about looking beyond the Live Register and recognising the people who wanted to work but, for all sorts of reasons, weren’t showing up through the usual recruitment channels.
Our mission was simple: get more women back into the workforce.
Then, a few months later, COVID happened.
The world shut down, unemployment soared, and suddenly we had launched a business designed to get people back to work at a time when huge numbers of people couldn’t work.
Not exactly in the business plan!
We had to pivot pretty quickly. We moved things online, changed what we were doing and tried to figure out what our community needed from us.
Since then, the world of work has changed again and again.
When we started, hybrid and remote working were barely part of the conversation. Then, almost overnight, they became the way many of us worked and eventually a normal part of working life. Now we’re seeing the pendulum swing again, with more and more companies asking people to return to the workplace.
We’ve also seen the conversation around diversity and inclusion change. For a number of years, there was real momentum behind employers looking more closely at who wasn’t making it through traditional recruitment processes and what they could do differently. More recently, some of that momentum has slowed, and we’ve seen that shift reflected here in Ireland too.
But while the conversation may have changed, the barriers haven’t. Career breaks still happen. People are still overlooked because their CV doesn’t follow a traditional path, and experienced women still step away from work for caring responsibilities.
If anything, it makes the work we’re doing even more important.
Back To Work Connect has changed enormously too.
What started as a social enterprise with an idea and a platform has grown into something much bigger. Today we have a community of thousands of Returners, a Returner-Friendly Jobs Board, education and upskilling opportunities, practical career resources, community events and support, and a growing network of employers who actively want to connect with experienced people returning to the workforce.
And our work with employers has evolved too. We’re no longer simply asking them to advertise opportunities to Returners. We’re working with them to look at how they attract, recruit and support Returners in the first place and helping to make recruitment more Returner-Friendly.
Last year alone, we welcomed 650,000+ platform views with 191,000 unique visitors to our platform, held 12 community events and had more than 30,000 visitors to our resource library.
Sometimes I look at the employers we work with now and think back to the early days when we had none. Literally none.
We were asking employers to believe in an idea and in a group of people that we felt the traditional recruitment process was too often overlooking.
Now I look at some of the organisations we work with and genuinely think: Wow. Look who we have working with us now.
If I could go back to March 2020 and tell my (slightly) younger self one thing, it would probably be: keep the faith, you won’t believe who you’ll have on the platform in a few years.
I’m very proud of that.
But I’m probably even more proud that, despite everything that’s changed, the reason we started hasn’t changed at all:
Get more women back into work.
Life happens.
This year, I had a life-changing event of my own and, as with all life-changing events, it has a way of making you stop and think about what’s really important.
Children come along. Parents need care. Relationships change. Jobs disappear. Health changes. Priorities change. Sometimes we change. And suddenly the plan you had for yourself might not fit quite as neatly anymore. At some point, you find yourself looking at what comes next and thinking:
Where do I even start?
I understand a little more now about what it feels like when the path you thought you were on suddenly changes and you’re trying to work out what the next version of your life might look like.
And maybe that’s why I believe more strongly than ever that returning to work shouldn’t just be about getting someone into a job as quickly as possible.
Sometimes, before you can decide where you’re going, you need the space to work out what you want now.
Seven years on, Back To Work Connect is still evolving.
We’ve recently given the website a bit of a facelift — seven years felt like a good excuse!
We’ve made it easier to find jobs, courses, resources and community support, and we’ve introduced our new Back to Work Roadmap to help people work out what their next step might be.
Because after seven years of talking to Returners, one thing is very clear:
There isn’t one route back.
For one person, the next step might be applying for a job. For someone else, it might be figuring out what skills they have, rebuilding their confidence, doing a course, meeting other people again or simply starting to believe that going back is possible.
Back To Work Connect looks a little different today.
Hopefully we sound a little more polished than we did in 2019 and know a little bit more! But underneath all of that, the mission we started with is still the same:
Get more women back into the workforce.
Seven years, a pandemic, plenty of change and quite a few lessons later, we’re still here.
And we’re still trying to make it work. Just like many of the people we support. ❤️
