The statistics about displaced workers and career outlook projections have been documented in painstaking detail since the pandemic began in 2020. According to industry news, 63% of workers who lost jobs because of the outbreak have changed their industry and 4% have changed their field or overall career path, according to a Harris Poll survey for USA TODAY.

There are industries that are thriving based on the necessity for economic recovery. And not surprisingly, those are technology, healthcare, real estate, banking, and warehousing.  

In an interview with Fast Company, Jenny Blake, author of Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One, explains that employers will be more understanding about mid-career changes because of the crisis. “The snow globe of the world has been shaken up,” Blake says. “No one is judging anyone for making a career change.”

Of course making a career pivot is exponentially more complicated when you’re a working mother. The prejudices inherent in our workforce mean women with families must be prepared to not only advocate for themselves, but they must have the mental flexibility and agility to adapt to changes, and grow around obstacles put in their path. Working mother Emily Haft Bloom reflects on her her life, the challenges she faced, and how she mastered a pivot out of a career into starting her own business.

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When I was eight years old, my mother earned a graduate degree, then worked full time for 25 years. She left for work before my brother and I went to school and returned after we did. She made us dinner every night, packed our lunches for the next day, and played tennis, read voraciously, was and still is an excellent partner to my dad, and continues to maintain many decades-old friendships. I never thought of her remarkable ability to balance so much seemingly with ease until I was a working mom myself. I think the word pivot, vaunted by college admissions officers of late, describes how she got it all done so well. Despite a move to step away from historical gender roles, in some families, the mom (or one parent in same-sex relationships) usually ends up managing much of the household. Everything from handling the kids to cleaning up after the pets to calling the plumber somehow ends up this one parent’s responsibility. When you add a career, or entrepreneurship, or a job search, or even a hobby (or anything other than being a parent, really) to the equation you may have a recipe for disaster. Or it could be a master class in pivoting. 

There are thousands of resources about juggling everything successfully, but I have found that no matter how brilliant or thoughtful the dispenser of said advice might be, what works for some won’t work for others. I believe the key to surviving as a working mom is learning how to pivot effectively and learning to let go. That is different from multitasking, which means doing a lousy job at a few things, just to get them done, rather than focusing entirely on one and executing effectively. My kids grew up at the very beginning of the social media/smartphone era, so there was no bottomless vortex of Twitter, Insta, or Facebook to consume hours of the day. I was also not distracted by a nightmarish political landscape. I found having the agility to pivot made establishing boundaries easier.