LinkedIn has announced that it will now include ‘stay-at-home mum’, ‘stay-at-home dad’ and ‘stay at home parent’ as official job titles on the networking site.
This is a major move for helping people who’ve paused their career to explain gaps on their CV and allows them to highlight what they did while not part of the paid workforce.
Until now, the professional social networking site would only approve job titles that were linked to an employer, leaving parents struggling to get a place back on the career ladder and be headhunted for roles via the website.
As anyone who has sacrificed their career to stay home and care for their children will know full well how intense it can be. Indeed, a recent study by Welch found that stay-at-home parents work for an average of 98 hours a week. Woah.
According to the study, stay-at-home parents’ day kicks off at 6:23am and doesn’t end until 8:31pm; that’s 14 hour a day and 98 hours a week. Respect.
The move from LinkedIn came after the networking site was criticised on blogging platform Medium, which explained: “Strikingly, there are zero pre-populated options on LinkedIn to identify maternity leave, parental leave, adoption leave, sick leave, bereavement leave, elderly care leave, or for long term injury/illness, education/re-training, volunteering, long term travel, a gap year, a sabbatical – or for a pandemic.
“LinkedIn’s silence is tantamount to a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell policy,’ in which employers and prospective employees dance around the topic of family, thereby preventing meaningful conversations about workplace policies that could better support the hiring, productivity, job satisfaction, and retention of employees who are also primary caretakers.”
Responding to the criticism in Fortune, LinkedIn’s director of engineering Bef Ayenew explained: “I wholeheartedly agree that we need to normalise employment gaps on the profile to help reframe hiring conversations.”
We like to see it.