"Many employers would like to be able to hire cheap, temporary teams of seasoned pros with experience managing $2 billion investment portfolios, running ad campaigns, or earning Ph.D.s in neuroscience," says Sue Shellenberger, work and family writer for Career Journal. "But few know the secret to finding temps of that caliber." One can find them wherever moms connect: on playgrounds and at PTA meetings, neighborhood networks, church events, and even their children’s birthday parties.
"The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy ‘SWAT team.’ The acronym, for ‘Smart Women with Available Time,’ is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss," reports Shellenberger.
Types of work these moms do:
* One team taught leadership skills to 100 MBA candidates last year by role-playing difficult management situations with them and critiquing their performances. The simulation training was so successful that enrollment doubled this spring and Kenan-Flagler made it mandatory for leadership training. Cost to the B-school: $21 an hour per woman.
* In another case, a team of five at-home moms hopped on a one-month project at Lending Tree to rewrite 600 job descriptions after several acquisitions and integrate them into its organization chart.
What’s different about these teams is that they’re available on short notice because the women are usually at home; they tend to work cheap because their main motive is to keep their skills fresh; and they’re often extraordinarily well-qualified, having left the work force voluntarily when their careers were on the ascent.
Examples of their executive skills:
* Michelle Fenton used to manage $2 billion in assets for Invesco AIM.
* Fenton’s marketing partner on the project used to direct the Levi Strauss, Dockers, and Pillsbury brands for the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding; then ran her own successful ad consultancy for several years.
* Jamie Pennington was a former stockbroker and investment banker.
* Ashley Hewitt was a former human resources director for Duke Energy.
What’s in it for these moms? For Donnabeth Leffler, a former news executive, "Using the brain cells, making the contacts, feeling productive and useful … and being in a room with people a lot like me … make such projects worth the effort." Source: The Wall Street Journal and Career Management Alliance E-Bridge.
– Jan Melnik, MRW, CCM, CPRW, President, Absolute Advantage