Raising kids is serious business

Touting “mom skills” on a professional resume is in vogue as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Apparently, something about effectively juggling work at home at the dining room table that served as the “home office” as well as the kid’s classroom has highlighted to employers a host of work-related skills that moms – and dads – knew they had all along, yet, hesitated to add to a resume.

“We need to tackle this stigma and condescension head-on by advertising from the get-go that we are working mothers and that we have additional strengths as employees,” wrote Katya Libin, CEO and co-founder of HeyMama.co based in Brooklyn, New York, in the Think: Opinion, Analysis, Essays section of NBCNews.com. “Doing so combats implicit and explicit bias by proclaiming that motherhood is something unambiguously positive, not to mention a common life choice. It also helps demonstrate that the skills mothers use to keep families afloat are transferable to the workplace.”

It is even hip to put “dad skills” on a resume as more men have taken on the Mr. Mom approach to child-rearing and seek to correlate that to worthy fodder for their resumes. More on that trend later in this article.

Professional Networking Sites Recognize Mom and Dad Roles

For now, let’s look at recent moves made by online networking giant LinkedIn to help moms, dads, and caregivers turn gaps in employment history into reasons employers might consider hiring them.

In April 2021, LinkedIn announced the addition of several new job titles including “stay-at-home mom” and “stay-at-home-dad.” In an even more progressive acknowledgement that being at home can develop “employable” skills, LinkedIn also removed its previous requirement that all job titles must be connected to a specific employer. Ten different designators for employment hiatus including “parental leave” and “family care leave” were also added.

“We’ve heard from our members, particularly women and mothers who have temporarily stopped working, that they need more ways to reflect career gaps on their profile due to parenting and other life responsibilities,” Bef Ayenew, engineering director at LinkedIn, told CBS MoneyWatch.com. This will, “allow full-time parents and caretakers to more accurately display their roles.”

Indeed.com and Monster.com both offer several “how-to” articles for effectively listing “mom” or “dad” or “parental” skills on a resume.

So, what are these parental skills that are now applicable to a resume?

According to a variety of online resume advice sites including Skillroads.com, here is just a smattering of skills that parents gain during on-the-job or should we say at-home training:

Communication including negotiation skills: Ever argued with a three-year-old about bedtime? Or a teen about curfew?

Teamwork and collaboration: Getting teens to help with yard work qualifies here.

Planning: Putting together that week-long trip to theme parks in central Florida is a check mark here.

Building Effective Community Relations: Keeping lines of communication open with hormonal tweens and teens that merely shrug their shoulders or grunt at questions posed by parental units.

Even Dice.com – the online spot for techie jobs – lists more than ten “soft skills” such as verbal and oral communication, presentation skills, and time management as items to be listed on today’s effective resume.

How This Works in the Real World

These “mom” and “dad” skills making the transition to a resume ought to be honed skills.

In other words, do not list “fundraising” on your resume if all you did was take a volunteer shift in a booth at the school carnival. However, if you headed up the fall wrapping paper sales campaign at your kiddos elementary school years, and managed other similar efforts, then adding “fundraising” and the success of the campaign is valid.

For Deborah Morton, translating the skill set she employs as a mother to her professional resume was a natural progression.

She had “mom skills” on her resume long before the pandemic hit.

“I was already doing all of those things from event planning to scheduling and budgeting as a mom, so why not showcase those skills on my resume,” Morton told “Advisors Magazine.”

In October of this year, she marks 16 years as the Recruiting Placement and Mentoring Supervisor for the Alaska Military Youth Academy located on JBER (Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson) in Anchorage, Alaska.

AMYA gives at-risk high school students an opportunity to graduate from high school and gain employment skills when the public school system is no longer an option.

In her role, Morton oversees every phase of a cadet’s tenure at AMYA from admission to graduation, and job placement and mentoring services for a year after the cadet completes the program. This includes budgeting, coordinating resources and schedules, fundraising, organizing volunteer mentors from the community who provide career guidance and professional development to cadets, planning and scheduling.

These are all tasks Morton said she completes as a mother raising monies for her children’s extra-curricular activities and their schools, plus maintaining the kid’s busy schedules: her son plays football and other sports, her daughter is a cheerleader and participates in pageants; and both children participate in community volunteer opportunities.

“Being a mom is a job. There are so many things you have to know how to do that correlate very well with the skills needed for a job,” she said. “Too many people sell themselves short when it comes to the skills they have and what they are capable of doing.”

What’s Good for Mom is Also Good for Dad

Morton’s husband, Jeff, struggled with what to include on his resume when he retired after 21 years as a police officer.

Jeff was looking at job descriptions and kept coming up with the same objection:

“I don’t have those skills, he would tell me,” Deborah said. “I looked at it and said, ‘oh, yes, you do. You do those things all the time as a dad.”

Jeff added his “dad” skills to his resume.

It worked. He landed a job as a deputy fire marshal on the Last Frontier where fire season is currently in full swing.

Granted, the number of men adding their fatherly skills to resumes probably doesn’t equal that of women who include motherly skills. Yet, men are beginning to view the prowess gained on the home front as credible experience for employment aptitude.

This trend is due in part to the fact that more men are opting to stay home to be the full-time caregiver.

According to Healthline.com, in 2012, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 189,000 married American men with children less than age 18 identified themselves as stay-at-home fathers. The official definition included having been outside the labor force for at least one year. Two years later, the Pew Research Center documented two million American fathers with children less than age 18 were not working outside the home and were the primary caregiver. In 2011, according to the website AtHomeDad.org, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a 26 percent increase in stay-home dads with seven million American men or 32 percent of U.S. married fathers with children – this time less than age 15 – self-reporting as the regular source of care for those children.

Just as in the case of the mother with an empty nest, these dads eventually work themselves out of a job on the home front. Their “professional” resume has a gap they need to explain to potential employers.

MyPerfectResume.com offers some solutions.

Noting that “it can be a little tricky for men to negotiate a return to work,” the website – which of course is trying to sell users a resume kit – does state, “In some professions, fathers taking time off for their family is still viewed as an oddity. However, by making the most of the skills used at home and writing a rock-solid stay-at-home dad resume, you can improve your chances of returning to the workforce.”

Examples

Here are just a few websites that offer examples of how mom and dad skills can be effectively listed on a resume as well as included in a cover letter.

Stay at Home Mom Resume: The 2021 Guide with 10+ Examples at Hiration.com.

From Stay-at-Home Parent to Job Seeker: Here's How to Nail Your Cover Letter (With Example!) at TheMuse.com.

13 Stay at Home Mom Resume Tips to Help You Translate Your Skills at VirtualVocations.com.

And lastly, here is an engaging and witty article on how one mom – Sydney Williams, global director of brand marketing at General Electric – updated her resume using only the skills she gained as the mother of two boys less than age three. The sub-head on the articles sums it up: “In a spot-on LinkedIn post, she proves moms are all-star employees.”

Director Mom Rewrites Resume Using Only Skills Gained From Motherhood—And We'd Hire Her, from Working Mother.com.