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Hi All
I have 18 years of experience , out of which 9 years I worked in Manufacturing industry in Quality and Planning area, then I shifted my career to SAP Functional in Manufacturing domain and in IT industry now for last 8+yrs. In between I have done executive MBA from IIM Kozhikode.Am I eligible to work in consulting in Bain India and Bain any other country?
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Chief
Soooooo, remember at “6 months later” she has a roughly 12-mo. She may still be nursing/pumping, waking up once or twice a night, etc.
Parental leave in many countries lasts for 18 months to 3 years.
As a mother, I wasn’t ready to really get back into the swing of things until my kids were in elementary school. Even then, still on a PT basis. My husband still works 20 hours a week so he’s available every day after school.
Many parents want to adjust their role at work when they become parents—for months or years. This is a good thing, because it suggests that they are trying to prioritize their families and be good parents.
Kind of a red herring given the topic, and no one said it was a feminist issue. Most of my comments are about parents. However, OP is a woman commenting about the firm's maternity leave and how a mother is being treated on her return to work. Your position might be about how the world "should" function, not how it actually functions. Which is great, but also not useful to OP in the real world.
The firm making the decisions for you because you are a mom returning should never be the case (and, yes, it would be interesting to see if they treat the returning dads the same way, because, in my experience, firms like this do not). And if that is what they're doing, and it doesn't work for OP, then OP should consider lateraling. It's highly presumptuous to think you or the firm knows what's best for any one particular family and assume they're doing them a favor.
The number of people commenting and acting like this is normal is wild. Unless your colleague has requested a step back (and it doesn’t seem like that is the case) this is absolutely a red flag about how your firm treats working mothers. I am a first time mom who came back from maternity leave approx 2.5 months ago and I was immediately put back on all of my cases. Then it took about 2 weeks after that to fully revamp my case load with staffing on new matters. If I found myself sidelined and doing mostly admin work after I returned from maternity leave I would be looking to lateral immediately.
Chief
Oh totally. Everything I said applies to dads. My spouse has been PT since we had kids. He definitely puts his family first.
The reality is that it’s hard to just disappear for 6 months completely and then come back, often still at a rough time in terms of childcare, especially if done multiple times. That is without getting into the lost experience and what typically is a ramp down and handing things off beforehand, too. If it wasn’t for parental leave, just disappearing for 6 months would obviously be something that would be contraindicated for your career.
When I came back from my parental leaves, I had to work very hard to re-establish cold connections and try to get staffed on things each time, even though I took significantly less than 6 months. Even at the most supportive firms, you can’t control what clients and prospects will do.
Similar vibes at my firm of 90 lawyers.
BUT I think most of the women coming back no longer wanted to be the lead after having their first kid. They told me they liked not having the pressure of the lead. Seems like your colleague wants to get back to the lead. I think she needs to keep making her view known to all - be vocal about it.
She's a new mom. Probably more tired than normal. I wouldn't be concerned. It seems to me the company is actually doing her a favor.
The reality is that it is very hard to disappear for 6 months, with ramp-up and ramp-down as well, and coming back with an infant, and to expect not even a temporary career impact. That is just reality and mostly client service-driven. Overcoming it requires dedicated effort by the lawyer and everyone else, but expecting to just slide right back where one was with no impact isn’t realistic, even if we, myself included, believe it should be.