The following is a transcript of our podcast conversation with Michelle Hopkins. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Sarah
Hello and welcome to Humans Beyond Resources, an HR podcast by Reverb, where we cover topics from culture to compliance. Reverb believes that every decision a leader makes reverberates throughout the organization. From hiring your first employee to training your entire workforce. We believe in building healthy, inclusive cultures that engage your team. I’m your host, Sarah Wilkins.
In today’s episode, we are speaking with Michelle Hopkins, Senior Program Manager at Amazon, about returnships. If you’re unfamiliar with this terminology, a returnship is a short term engagement for professionals who want to re enter the workforce after an extended period of time. Unlike internships returnship, candidates are usually more experienced professionals with significant work history. Michelle brings some first hand knowledge of returnships and will share with us how to make them successful and the benefits they can bring to your organization. Welcome, Michelle.
Michelle
Hi, Sarah, thanks for having me today.
Sarah
I’m so excited. So let’s dive into the questions that we had discussed. So first, will you share a little bit more about you and your experience with.
Michelle
I’ll start a little bit with just about myself. So, as you said, my name is Michelle Hopkins. I’m originally from the greater Vancouver, Canada area, but I currently live in beautiful, sunny Seattle with my husband Sean and my son Liam. I’ve had a fairly unique career journey, I would say. My background is in accounting and audit. I’m a CPACA designated in Ontario, Canada. So I spent many years working in audit with a specialty in financial institutions, having worked for some big Four accounting firms within Canada, Bermuda, and the United States. But in 2015, I had an opportunity come up to pursue a pipe dream of mine, which was to open a women’s clothing boutique. I knew there was going to be some level of risk involved, but I also knew that if I didn’t try it, I’d probably always look back and regret not at least having attempted. So I took a leap of faith and walked away from the corporate world and a fairly lucrative career and went to pursue entrepreneurship. I would say it ended up being an incredible experience of personal growth, provided me with an opportunity to recognize that I could really take on exceptional challenges and still succeed and figure things out and make mistakes and learn and learn again and make more mistakes. So it was a really refreshing also opportunity to meet and interact with people who had totally different professional backgrounds than myself. I think I’d been embedded in sort of a finance and accounting mindset which didn’t always necessarily translate to folks in the fashion industry. And so I love that my entrepreneurship journey was not only a valuable learning experience, but also helped to diversify my perspective and the way I relate to people from a variety of different backgrounds as well. In 2017, my son was born and I made a bittersweet decision to step away from the paid workforce completely and care for him full time. I spent about two and a half years as a full time stay at home mom. And when I was ready to go back to work, I found it really challenging to resume my career. I felt that having this glaringly obvious gap in my resume was a disadvantage. And even though I was pounding the pavement looking for jobs, applying to positions, I just wasn’t getting the callbacks that I wanted. So I decided to amend my approach a little bit. I believe I actually Googled how to return to work after a career break and I came across several different companies that sort of help other companies create returnship programs. And through this search, I found a returnship program in Amazon’s worldwide consumer Finance Organization. It was a small pilot program being run by a single recruiter as a side of the Desk Passion project. And there were eight of us that started in this first cohort. I landed on the Supply Chain Optimization Technologies Finance team and eventually I was hired on full time. And currently, as you mentioned, I’m a senior program manager. I work on the AWS Sales, Marketing and Global Services finance team.
Sarah
Thank you so much for sharing your background and I know your story of your career break and finding a role after the break and caring for your child. I talk to women all the time, having kind of trouble reentering the workforce after that. And so when you and I talked, I was so interested in this returnship program and how that helped you kind of reenter and find your role that you’re in still today. So thank you for sharing about that. How do you think the returnship kind of helped set you up for your role? At Know?
Michelle
I would say that probably without the returnship program, I wouldn’t be at Is. I guess a lot of companies use algorithms now to sort through hundreds of applications and resumes, and there probably isn’t a specific one that really helps to identify those who have a career gap for the purpose of caregiving, but who are professionals, who have a lot of experience and are highly educated and are ready to return to the workforce. So I think a lot of the times these resumes are completely overlooked. And so given what my resume looked like when I had about a two and a half year gap for when I was an entrepreneur and another two and a half year gap for when I was a stay at home mom, I don’t believe that I would have necessarily had my resume seen or reviewed. And so I think that it’s really important that companies sort of consider that there is this very obscure, untapped pool of talent out there that may not even know how to surface themselves. And so it is a challenge, I would say, but being able to be given an opportunity to sort of prove myself and to show people that I still have a lot to offer. Even though I’m sort of a mid career professional, I really value having had that opportunity and having that experience to be able to a, just get my foot in the door at a company and then be able to continue my career and start padding my resume again.
Sarah
That’s great. Thank you. And then can you talk a little bit more about how your internship worked or how internships in general work for companies that are interested in this type of program?
Michelle
Yeah, for sure. So, essentially, having a return to program is just like a dedicated recruiting channel. And so, in many cases, folks who are looking to return to work, they just don’t even know how to start. And so I think, first of all, just having a company be able to really advertise the fact that they have this recruiting channel is really helpful. It’s very valuable, too, for folks who maybe have maybe outdated skill sets if they’ve been away from the workforce for a really long time, or maybe they have outdated technical skills if they’re looking for technical work. It’s really important, I think, for a company to structure their returnship so that there’s sort of dedicated training and support for these individuals. So, essentially, the objective of the returnship is to reintroduce the returner back to the workforce. And so it’s important for companies to provide, I would say, special support from their managers and maybe their overall team in consideration of these folks who’ve had their time off. So, in my situation, I was paired with a manager who was just passionate about helping women return to work, which was great. And so he was a really awesome mentor for me. I really enjoyed working with him, and he did take a lot of time to spend with me to kind of help ramp me back up. My internship was structured similarly to an internship. It was a four month term to begin with, and then during that time, I was assigned to a special project with the requirement to write a six page document at the end of the internship term, which basically served as sort of an assessment or an evaluation as to whether I would be offered a full time permanent position at the end. So I had a really interesting project, which I really liked. So, as I said, I was in the Supply Chain Optimization Technologies team, focused specifically on inventory valuation. And my project was actually to do with the Soft Lines organization at Amazon, which is actually their fashion side. So kind of a relevant project for me, and super exciting and super complex supply chain at Amazon, as you can imagine. So it was not an easy project, but it was interesting.
Sarah
That’s great. And then it sounds like obviously there’s a benefit to individuals returning to the workforce. And we kind of talked about some of the ones that you felt you had as a result of a Returnship. But why do you think returnships are beneficial for companies or organizations to consider?
Michelle
Yeah, well, like I mentioned, I just feel like having a dedicated recruiting channel for Returners helps companies tap into an obscure talent pool that they may not even be aware exists. I think the Returner talent pool is made up of individuals, at least in my experience and other Returners that I’ve met who are very mature. They’re in middle of their careers, they have a wealth of experience, they’re highly educated, many have professional designations such as MBAs or CPAs. And so these are people who have so much to offer for a company that they’re still highly motivated. And I think it really helps companies to sort of expand and diversify their recruiting pipeline by opening up to people who have a gap in their careers. And like I said, I’ve met many Returners through my time at Amazon. I sort of had volunteered to mentor other Returners coming into the program. And many of them are women, and a large portion are women of color as well. And so, like, you know, being able to expand this pipeline to super talented, highly educated, ambitious, motivated individuals can also help diversify a company’s talent pool. And I think speaking from experience as well, getting back into the workforce after taking time off is a super daunting and intimidating experience. And so I think companies, if they are willing to open up a channel just for reference, it can kind of help with that process of going back into the workforce and make it a little bit more palatable and easier for folks who are wanting to go back to work.
Sarah
Yeah, I like that. And I think over the last three years, especially due to COVID, a lot of individuals left the workforce for caregiving reasons, either family members or children or elderly adults, and so reentering the workforce, I know we want to kind of get those people back into the workforce. And I like how you pointed out women, and in particular women of color and people of color and helping diversify your organization. So I think many benefits come from that and having the skilled workforce that isn’t maybe being tapped into as much. Totally, yeah. So we talked about all the benefits and maybe just the amount of time maybe it takes or the thoughtfulness in creating a program like this. Right, but what are some of the common challenges organizations or individuals may encounter with Returnships?
Michelle
Yeah, that’s a very fair question. I’ll speak to my own experience. So I think because my Returnship program was in its infancy at the time, like I said, it was pilot program operated by one individual who had a regular day job. And so I think for that reason, there wasn’t really a lot of robust programmatic support behind the program. I think if I had had somebody who was like a dedicated mentor, maybe like a prior Returner that would have been really helpful to me because I could have fully been able to speak to somebody who’s had a similar experience. Of course, because it was a new program, there probably weren’t a lot of prior returners. But I think as a sort of go forward opportunity it really be great if you could have sort of a dedicated support group for people coming in as returners, made up of other returners. And so there could be just sort of mutual conversations about what it’s like to come back to the think. You know, for myself it was very intimidating being around folks who were just so smart and highly educated and ambitious and who had been at Amazon for some time and I felt a little bit lost. Amazon’s a very fast paced and complex organization and so navigating through all the nuances is challenging as any new person. But as somebody who the week before I think I had been playing with Legos and scrubbing dried milk off of the walls. The next thing I know I’m sitting in a business review meeting with DPS and so that transition is actually a little bit more challenging than some people might think. And I think for companies who are looking to do this, I think it has to be very, like you said, thoughtful and intentional. I think maybe having a specific onboarding or ramping back kind of program even if it’s maybe like part time for the first week or first two weeks just to kind of help ease people through the transition back. I think that is something that can be really beneficial and helpful so that people don’t get overwhelmed. A lot of it depends on your personality too. I did find it very intimidating, but I just sort of went ahead full force and I went and found a network and I sat on the board of amazon’s women in finance affinity group for a little while and I was able to find sort of a community and sort of just get involved as much as I could. But some people may not be as willing to do so and I think those folks can kind of get lost. And so I think being able to really thoughtfully help support a returner as they go back into the workforce is really important. I also think that pairing a returner or putting them into the right team would be really helpful. I think for my program, because it was so new there wasn’t really a lot of intention put into where to place somebody like me. I think the area that I was placed didn’t necessarily relate much to my prior experience and I think being able to sort of more thoughtfully place folks where they might thrive the best in a spot that might align really well with their prior experience can be really helpful. And so I think those are a couple of things that organizations would need to consider when thinking about putting into place a returnship program as a returner. I think also it’s a pretty significant adjustment and change to your life when you go back to work and so for myself that meant just having a really honest conversation with my husband about expectations. I knew there needed to be sort of a shift or a rebalance of responsibilities. I knew that I needed to set certain boundaries on pickup and drop off times with my son at daycare and then sort of managing my work schedule along with that. It really just meant being prepared in advance and having that conversation ahead of time so that I wasn’t sort of scrambling as I got back into the workforce. So I think preparing yourself mentally as a returner for that shift in your life is super important as well.
Sarah
Yeah thank you for sharing those and I think that would be really helpful for people to consider as they’re developing these programs. In your case you got a job, a full time role at Amazon following your returnship but is that typical? And what kind of support is there for those individuals to land a job.
Michelle
Yeah so in what I’ve seen there is essentially basically the returnship is structured with the expectation that there’s going to be a full time role at the end of it. And I guess your returnship term as well as the project and presentation that you end up doing during your term is meant to sort of serve as the assessment know does this individual fit within our know, do they have the potential to kind of grow into their role either here or elsewhere? I think at Amazon there’s a super supportive culture around rotating to different teams and so I think some of the other returners I’ve met, even though they may have spent their return trip term in one organization perhaps after when they were hired on full time they could have moved somewhere else as well. And so that is essentially the expectation I think in our cohort of the original eight I think six of us were offered full time positions and so there are times when it just doesn’t work out and either it’s a company that’s not the right fit or maybe that person wasn’t ready to go back to work. It could be for a myriad of reasons but I think essentially the point of it or the objective is to actually have this additional sort of recruitment channel to bring people full time back into the workforce. I will also say that even for those who don’t end up with a full time role, I think just having that internship on your resume helps to sort of at least get you back into things. I think it certainly will help to say that, hey, I spent four months trying this out at whatever company it might be. And it was a really valuable experience. It didn’t end up in a full time permanent position, but hey, it kind of helped me shift my mindset a little bit and get back into a working mindset from being like a full time caregiver mindset. So I think in either case, whether or not it ends up in a full time role, I think it’s still a valuable experience.
Sarah
Yeah, absolutely. I agree. This is all really helpful. As we wrap up, do you have any kind of closing thoughts that you’d want to leave either Returners or companies and organizations with regarding returnships?
Michelle
Yeah, I think in my ultimate ideal world, I dream of the day when internship programs aren’t even necessary. It would be great if having a gap in your resume was completely normalized and was not a blocker to getting hired because I think it would really end up being less of a disadvantage to, like I said, the large portion of Returners as women and a lot of women of color as well. So I think that would be really amazing if it didn’t even have to be a dedicated recruiting channel. But I don’t think we’re there yet, which is really unfortunate. But we’ve been navigating strange times in the last handful of years and like you mentioned during the pandemic, many women, many people, but many women as well just had to leave the workforce because of a lack of childcare. And so where are these people now? There’s also been a lot of layoffs in the past few months, especially in the tech sector, but hopefully the economy balances out soon and we’ll go back to all surviving. And so what does that mean for people who are looking to get back into the workforce? I think considering a returnship program at this juncture would be good because we want to prepare for the future and for people who are going to be ready to return to the workforce someday. I’d also say as a Returner, don’t give up. I’ve been there. I totally understand how intimidating and how overwhelming it can seem when you’re looking for work. And it kind of seems like it’s going to be such an uphill battle to get back into it. But it’s possible, I think just not giving up, believing in yourself, just remembering that you have so much experience and that you have a lot to offer and really just having that confidence to go forward. And again, there were some days when I remember my very first day as a Returner at Amazon and my manager took me to, like I said, a business review meeting with VPs. And I was so overwhelmed by, I guess, the subject matter of what they were talking about. I didn’t even think they were speaking English. There was tons of acronyms, a lot of tech jargon that I didn’t fully understand. And in my head I just thought, what have I done, but I just kind of ended up working through that, found some great mentors to work with and people to talk to to kind of help guide me through navigating some of the complexities of working at Amazon. And for me, it was the sector in an industry that I’d never worked in before, so it was extra intimidating. But I would say just to the returners out there, it’s possible and don’t give up.
Sarah
Yeah, great. Well, thank you so much. I loved hearing more about this topic and how it can benefit individuals but also companies in creating this recruiting channel. So thank you so much. And for those interested, I’ll place some links more about and maybe some companies that have the programs already in place for those that are interested. Thank you, Michelle.
Michelle
Thank you
Sarah
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