In 2006, I quit my job at Qualcomm in California, quit business school at University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business, cashed out on real estate investments, and stayed home for three years as a stay-at-home dad to raise our daughter (born 2005) while my wife, Zara Mahbub, my co-hort at Haas, continued on to finish her MBA.
Minus breastfeeding, I did everything that a "stay-at-home" mom does.
I rejoined the workforce in 2009 as the CEO of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) Bangladesh, and then went on to become the CEO of IBM Bangladesh.
While my colleagues at the latter two organizations can tell better, I personally thought I came back into the workforce as a much, much better me.
Those three years of raising a child in the US, where you do not have any helping hands, made me better at managing time, anticipating crises, managing crises on a daily basis, staying calm, owning up to responsibilities, and most of all, managing sentiments.
As a result, fire fights at NSN and IBM were not as distressing, managing organizational behaviour was not as daunting, and understanding the pains and issues of fellow colleagues was all the more transparent and compassionate.
A similar experience was shared by my good friend Johan Frisell, former Swedish ambassador to Bangladesh who was a guest on my TV show, where he said that his year off from the diplomatic corps to raise their children made him a better diplomat. (In Sweden, the government mandates paid leave of two years for both the parents, where one of them has to at least take 12 months or so off for the child).
So, my take is that, someone with a gap in his/her (and all pronouns) career may actually be a better asset, rather than an impediment, when rejoining the workforce because it is very likely that (s)he is bringing in some unique experiences that may otherwise not have been possible to attain while employed full-time.
And I would say it is applicable a lot more to women coming back to work after a break in caring for their children, thus being a multi-faceted asset, many a times neither appreciated nor valued.
As a stay-at-home dad for 3 years (and later again for many more years with our second and third kids), I can attest to the fact that if you raise a child at home, everything back at work is a piece of cake.
Naveed Mahbub is an engineer turned comedian and talk show host. He formerly served as the CEO for Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) Bangladesh and IBM Bangladesh.
