About Career Returners

Career Returners is a purpose-led consulting, coaching and network organisation, specialising in enabling professionals who have taken a long career break to get back to fulfilling work. A social business, we’re on a mission to make career breaks a valued part of a lifetime career. We want to remove the ‘Career Break Penalty’ – dismantling the personal and structural barriers faced by professionals who want to get back to their careers after taking long breaks for childcare, eldercare, health or other reasons. Our goal is to make career breaks a normal part of a 40 to 50 year career.

Our founders set up the organisation as Women Returners in 2014, driven by their own experiences of returning to work after multi-year career breaks, and a frustration with the huge waste of skills and experience resulting from the career break penalty. We changed our name to Career Returners in January 2024 to reflect the evolution of our activities to support returners of all genders.

We are the leading experts in enabling the return to fulfilling work of experienced professionals after an extended career break. We work with individuals, organisations and public bodies.

Our management and coaching teams have been working with the returner community for many years, both before and after their return to the workforce. We have the unique combination of an in-depth understanding of the return-to-work journey and returner programme success factors, a practical commercial perspective, and psychology-based returner coaching expertise.

We combine commercial and not-for-profit activities:

• We have partnered with over 180 leading employers across sectors to create supported bridges back to mid to senior level roles. We led the introduction of returnships into Europe and created both Career Returners Coaching and the Supported Hiring Returner Programme concept to support returners directly into permanent roles.
• We provide specialist consultancy and coaching services globally to organisations to enable them to design, promote and deliver best practice returner programmes, consistent with both diversity and talent recruitment objectives.
• We run the largest European network community of returning professionals, the free-of-charge Career Returners Professional Network, providing advice, inspiration, information and support to returners.
• We act as a voice and advocate for returners within Government, industry and media debate, bringing to the forefront the practical and psychological barriers and solutions to getting back into rewarding work after a long break.