The best flexible jobs for women this week (26th Nov) - Women's Agenda

The best flexible jobs for women this week (26th Nov)

I do love a good job-sharing role and we have one this week with a role from law firm Clayton Utz. It’s a 3-day a week role as a people and development consultant Sydney role with the ideal days being Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. The ideal candidate has several years of HR generalist experience working in similar role in a complex, professional and client-focused environment.

Job-sharing gets a lot of profile, but it’s actually pretty rare. There are no actual figures (the Australian Bureau of Statistics used to break them out but stopped a few years ago) however it takes a very special set of circumstances for a successful job-sharing arrangement to be sustainable. Think how hard it is to find the right job and then add in finding the right partner where you can work in an overlapping and seamless style. I’ve done some research in this area and published a job-sharing guide where I interviewed 10 sets of job-sharers and what I found was that most job-sharing is organic. It normally arises when women are working together and have known each other for a while or they are introduced by a more senior manager. It requires huge levels of trust and typically all the research focuses on successful job-sharers, I reckon successful job-sharers are the tip of a iceberg of job-sharing arrangements that don’t work. That said—I don’t want to be too downbeat—job-sharing has huge benefits, particularly in terms of doing complex roles that can’t be redesigned to fit a part-time schedule. It’s great to see firms like Clayton Utz considering these kind of roles and I will follow it up to see how it goes.

There are some other good flexible roles around this week including a part-time marketing role in Melbourne with APositive Cashflow—it is looking for someone that can take the business to the next level.

Finally there’s another type of role that I think that women—particularly mothers looking to return to work—should consider, and that is the short-term contract role. It can typically be hard for women that have been out of the market for more than two years to get back in, and short-term contract roles can be a way of getting some recent experience. I think that women tend to shy away from these roles and typically want the security of part-time permanent work. That’s completely understandable, but it can be hard to land that perfect flexible role when you have been out of the market for a while. Crowe Howarth has a short-term contract role for a forensic accountant in Sydney working from now until Christmas that could be the re-entry point for someone. It also has some interesting opportunities in the regions that could be worth checking out for women outside the main centres.

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