Interview questions after a career break: address it once, then get on with the evidence

Yes — the two years are parental leave that I extended deliberately, and the return is planned rather than sudden.

What I kept live during it: I ran communications for our village pre-school as a volunteer — a small thing that turned real when they were fundraising to replace a condemned roof. I built the campaign that raised £9,200 across four months: a case-for-support document, a local-press piece, and a sponsor pack that signed up six businesses. It reminded me how much of marketing survives context.

On currency: I finished the CIM digital refresher in April, mostly to check how much had moved — the honest answer is that paid social had moved a lot and brand strategy hadn't.

The break did exactly what it was for, and it's complete: childcare is settled, and I've been interview-ready since spring. What I'm looking for now is a role like this one, where the campaign end of my experience carries the first six months while I get back up to match-speed on the channel detail.

Because I tested the question before you did.

When I decided to return, the first thing I did was audit what had moved. In my corner of testing the answer was: the tooling more than the discipline. Playwright had largely displaced the framework I knew, and the pipelines had moved to GitHub Actions almost everywhere.

So I rebuilt against that gap deliberately. Since February I've written an automated suite — about 180 tests — for an open-source booking project, using exactly that stack, and the maintainers merged it. Two of my pull requests got rejected first time, which was genuinely useful: the review comments were my measure of where my code style had dated, and the third one went in clean.

What hasn't changed is the part of testing that was never about tooling: working out what will break, and writing the case that proves it. Three years away sharpened my respect for that part — and the merged suite is my evidence the tooling part is closed too.

The continuous candidate gives you a faster first month — I'll concede that plainly. Here's what I'd put against it.

First, fourteen years of month-ends against their fewer — the break paused my career, not my experience. I've closed books through an acquisition, two system migrations, and an audit that found the problem we'd already found ourselves. Judgement of that kind doesn't decay in two years; the shortcuts in a new ledger system do, and those are relearnable in weeks.

Second, the break itself built something I'd not have chosen to build this way but won't pretend is nothing: two years of coordinating care between a hospital discharge team, social services, and a family that didn't always agree taught me more about running a difficult stakeholder meeting than any finance role has.

Third — and this is the practical one — I want stability now. You'd be hiring a controller whose next five years are deliberately here. The continuous candidate's faster first month is real; weigh it against the shape of the following five years.

One thing, honestly — but it's directly relevant.

I took the break deliberately, after eight years without a pause, and I spent part of it running the volunteer logistics for a 400-runner charity trail race: route marshals, three water stations, kit drops, and the unglamorous spreadsheet that ties it together. Volunteer operations are operations with the management tools removed — nobody has to do what you say, so every process has to be simple enough to survive people ignoring your instructions.

That constraint changed how I design processes. The race-day briefing I wrote was one page, because I learned marshals don't read page two — and when I compare it with the four-page handover documents I used to write in my last role, I know which version actually gets followed.

I won't inflate the rest of the break into professional development — some of it was rest, and rest was the point. But the simplicity discipline is real, it's tested on 400 runners and 60 volunteers, and ops teams are usually drowning in processes that assume people read page two.

With a plan rather than a hope — and I'd gently say the useful version of this question is about capability, so that's the one I'll answer.

I've been back at full working capacity since the start of the year. I tested that claim before asking an employer to: since January I've held a three-day-a-week contract covering project support for a housing association's kitchen-replacement programme — 130 properties, four contractors, residents to schedule around. It ran at full programme pace on the days I worked, and I finished it because the contract ended, not because I did.

What I took from it practically: my first fortnight back was slower than my fourth, so for this role I'd want the standard structured induction and nothing bespoke. By week three on the contract I was running the contractor call alone.

The pace here is part of why I applied. Project support that isn't demanding is usually project support where nothing is being built — and I've just spent six months proving to myself, on a live programme, that demanding suits me again.