Career Breaks
When it's time for a serious break!
April 2023 marks a year since I left my banking career and started my Career Break. In honor of this, below are Career Break stories of 3 individuals, including my own to provide insights on what it's like to take a Career Break.
1) What point were you at in your career when you chose to take a Career Break?
When I decided to take my career break, I was about 5 years into my career. I was working for an oil and gas services company and had been promoted about 4 times within the company. About 3 months prior to leaving, I was promoted to a Technical Sales Engineer role.
2) Why did you decide to take a Career Break?
When I was reflecting on my future at the company, I had a hard time visualizing any position in which I would be happy. Due to the nature of the business, I would regularly work many hours and receive phone calls throughout the night, something I no longer wanted for my life.
Actually receiving my promotion to a sales role (a new job function for me!) solidified my desire to take a break and gain some clarity because I wasn't actually excited about the promotion..in fact I cried (unhappy tears) when I got it.
3) How did you utilize your time during your Career Break?
I used my time off to travel! At the time, I didn't have the capacity for deep reflection as to why I needed a break and that I was in fact burning out. What I could see was there is a huge planet to explore and I would much rather be doing that.
4) What was your favorite or most impactful trip during your Career Break and why?
I think my favorite trip during my Career Break was through Central Asia. This was a region of the world I wasn't very familiar with and I believe it is when I fell in love with "off-the-beaten-path" travel. I had joined a group, overland tour and we spent 5 weeks traveling through Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The pace was slow, the countries were beautiful, the people were welcoming, the history was rich, and we spent a ton of time camping so I saw more stars than I had ever seen up until that point. This was the first segment of my career break that I would have never been able to do on vacation (due to time constraints) and it opened my eyes to the perception of time.
5) What had the biggest effect on you during your Career Break?
Of course the opportunity to experience the world was amazing, but something I think about often is that one decision changed the entire trajectory of my life. I now feel more empowered to make "risky" decisions because not only have I witnessed the payoff first hand, I also experienced that the scariest part is the stories you create in your head about the unknown.
6) Did you decide to return to your prior career or pivot into something new?
After my initial career break, I decided to return to the workforce as I didn't recognize that there were other options out there. I knew I didn't want to get back into engineering, so I was very intentional with my job search, spending time applying only to jobs that I was really excited about. It worked and I ended up receiving dozens of interviews and three job offers. Nowadays, I have started my own small business helping people travel more through career breaks and remote work and discovering the travel possibilities that are out there for them.
Austin C.
1) What point were you at in your career when you chose to take a Career Break?
I was 8 or 9 years into my career working for software and high-tech start-ups focused on sales, marketing, and business development. I was the first employee at a company I helped build to 40-50 employees and was Head of Revenue managing a small team overseeing many integral responsibilities when I decided to take my Career Break.
2) Why did you decide to take a Career Break?
I had been working 60+ hour weeks for almost 10 years. Working very hard, working all the time, always thinking about work, even when I wasn't working. I also hadn’t taken maybe more than 8 weeks of vacation in almost 10 years. ​So I was pretty pretty burnt out. I also sacrificed a lot of my life for the company
and my career success. I underwent some personal things that helped me realize that work wasn’t as important as I spent my time focused on. It wasn’t more important than other parts of my life, like my friendships, relations, happiness, and my emotional and physical health. When I left my company, I didn’t have much of a plan, but ended up consulting for a few friend’s companies for about a year before taking my Career Break. I finally reached the point where I realized working less wasn't the same as not working at all and wanted to have time to do the things that I've been thinking about and putting off for a very long time.
3) How did you utilize your time during your Career Break?
​I spent most of the 6 months of my Career Break living and traveling throughout Mexico and South America. My Career Break gave me the opportunity to travel like a vagabond, more slowly and take my time to really experience a place and not just the top things to do there. Living in Mexico and traveling through South America for an extended period of time also allowed me to practice my Spanish and more thoroughly experience the culture and community there.
4) What was your favorite or most impactful trip during your Career Break and why?
My most impactful trip was a trip to Peru. I went with someone I was dating and ended up breaking up 3 days into the trip. I still had a whole month left to be there and didn’t know anyone there or have any plans other than what we planned to do together. The trip allowed me to learn how to travel alone for an extended period of time, which I hadn’t done for more than 2 weeks previously. I ended up making good friends and figured out how I wanted to spend my time without having to compromise for someone else’s plans. It was the first time that I was free to travel how I wanted to.
5) What had the biggest effect on you during your Career Break?
Moving from a big US city to small beach and mountain towns in a foreign country where I wasn’t fluent in the language with a very different culture had the biggest effect on me. Drastically changing my environment really helped me figure out how I want to live my life and spend my time. Also, taking my yoga teacher training with a community in Ecuador had a giant impact on me. It was the first time in my life, I dedicated over 4 weeks of my full time and energy to something I was really interested in. From sunrise to sunset, I was in classes, learning and practicing yoga. It also really helped me understand the value of having a community of people and investing in community.
6) Did you decide to return to your prior career or pivot into something new?
I still work in the Business Development, Sales & Marketing space, but now part-time for a small engineering company. I lead a team of other fully remote people. The remote work allows me to still travel and move around as I like. Working part-time allows me to spend much more of my energy on my hobbies, passions and interests. It also allows me to have time to consult and advise friends with their businesses. I've also been diving into different modalities within the wellness space with breath work and yoga providing free classes to make them more accessible to people, especially those who suffer from emotional and mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression. I also do some work in the psychedelic space to help people utilize them for personal growth and transformation.
1) What point were you at in your career when you chose to take a Career Break?
I was approaching 15 years in my Corporate Banking career when I chose to take a Career Break. I had been with the same bank in the same group for my entire career and at my current level as a Director for 4 years.
2) Why did you decide to take a Career Break?
It was a combination of factors. The COVID-19 pandemic had a fairly drastic negative impact on my work. The amount and type of responsibilities from that and other initiatives changed and an already very time-intensive and stressful job became even more so. That combined with other factors made me me feel like it was finally time to consider a change.
I also questioned for some time what I was working towards, what's my end goal. I didn't want to wait until a retirement age much later in life to have extended time away from work, if I didn't have to. I wanted to be able to allocate more time to things I enjoy, while I'm still young and healthy, primarily more extensive travel.
3) How did you utilize your time during your Career Break?
I spent the first 6 months of my Career Break traveling to at least one place in the US and internationally each month. I visited a combination of places I had been before and had familiarity with, while adding new places within that country and some new countries too. After 6 months, I started working on Gwen's Getaways and have been building it out over the last 6 months. Over the last 12 months, I visited over 12 countries and territories and a similar amount of US cities.
4) What was your favorite or most impactful trip during your Career Break and why?
I really enjoyed all the trips I took during my Career Break for different reasons. My favorite was probably my trip to Greece. It was where I stayed the longest and tried to immerse myself the most. I felt most at ease there, but also had one of the most adventurous experiences thanks to a friend I met there.
5) What had the biggest effect on you during your Career Break?
Having more time to do things I enjoy, like traveling, and embarking on new ventures at this point in my life, had the biggest positive effect on me.
6) Did you decide to return to your prior career or pivot into something new?
I decided to start this website Gwen's Getaways as a means to combine my interests into one platform with the goal of providing others with insights to help with their travels.