Is It Time To End The Stigma Of “Resume Gaps” In The Legal Profession?

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a pandemic and a lot of turbulence in the legal market. Some sectors (I’m looking at you, M&A attorneys) saw a boom. Other sectors (most litigation practices) slowed down. Sadly, many attorneys lost their jobs or chose to stay home for personal reasons.

A question we often get is how to deal with gaps on the resume. It’s been a difficult thing to discuss. Perhaps it’s about to get a bit easier.

LinkedIn, the business social network, just released a feature that will allow people to add a “career break” to their LinkedIn profiles. It will give users a chance to write a blurb about what the circumstances were around the break. You can state that you were focusing on your family, travelling, etc.

While this clearly won’t break the stigma around having gaps in your resume, it will allow for your online resume (because that’s truly what LinkedIn is) to provide some context for gaps. Additionally, just the name “career break” is subtle signaling that it should be more tolerated to take a break. It’s not a gap, but a break…. a pause….a chance to catch your breath.

LinkedIn conducted a survey and found that women have more career breaks than men. This isn’t surprising as many women are forced to take breaks to start a family. According to LinkedIn, 64% of women have taken a career break and 70% of those women who took breaks say that the break helped them gain perspective on their career and figure out how they wanted to move forward in their career.

That number is staggering. A full 70% of those who took breaks said it was positive for them and their career. Maybe it’s time that we dropped the stigma of taking a break?

We are under no delusion that the larger firms will be anything but very slow adopters to change on those that take a career break. But maybe this small change will usher in an age where lawyers can actually take a breather from their career and not have it be frowned upon.

One can hope.

Until then, you should still tread lightly on having gaps in your resume.

HOW TO: To add a career break to your LinkedIn profile, click on the “add section” option located under your profile picture followed by “add career break.” From there, you can add the type of career break that makes sense for you and draft a description like you would add any other jobs.