How Long Did It Take You To Find A (Decent) Job After Lengthy Break?

[wysiwyg]

The main thing I encountered was those business did not create part-time positions for new staff, but more an existing staff member required part-time, so they made changes for them.

This is my current experience, I am looking for part-time (made redundant after DD - whole teams jobs moved to Kuala Lumpar - went back full time to contract job for 12 weeks (DH part time but I hated working five days a week) so then negotiated part time contract for 7 months before having DS.)

Now I can't even get past recruitment agents - jobs are never advertised (SAP WM/Logistics Consultant) as part-time (3 days a week) and recruitment agents just are not interested once can't convince you 5 days a week, trying to do everything via old contacts but is hard as market is flat (most jobs are moving to India, or require travel). I don't really know what to do, have got the kids in daycare as need to for the places, but can't do that indefinitely - we could borrow some money for a bit and I could just take kids out of daycare and stay at home - but then worry about what would do in a couple of years down the line, when would want full time again - would the extended time out of the workforce be a problem? - maybe I need to do something different given the way the market is going - not really sure what. Maybe I should suck it up and get a full time contract role - somehow work out daycare, and then hope I can negotiate it down to part time - I really don't want to do that also annoys me in principal how closed the market is to part-time.

[Bumperstump Cummerbund]

I had 18 months off and recently went back to work, and yes, there were a lot of questions about why I'd been out so long. Maybe an answer like maternity leave would be more satisfactory than my vague hiding-my-nervous-breakdown answer, in which case you wouldn't have a problem. Surprisingly, I even had trouble getting back into temp work. My field is admin/accounts, so there may also be a difference in the environment to what you'd be going in to.

[Starfish]

I think I looked for work for about 5-6 months before finding my current job.
I applied for literally hundreds of jobs and was starting to get really despondent that I wasn't getting anywhere. Before having DD, I worked in PA/senior administrator jobs in universities and educational institutions. These were the jobs that I initially applied for, but as I was getting nowhere, I started applying for more junior roles, then for entry level roles. It was getting very disheartening.
At that time, the place that I now work for was advertising several positions. I applied for a part-time reception/admin job, but then got a call telling me that they thought I would be more suited to the full time management position and asked me if I wanted to apply for it, which I did. I made it clear from the start that while I was happy to work full time, I was still breastfeeding DD and asked how I could manage this. I've been there for over three years now.

[deletedit]

deleted