Women Like Us Careers Online will be a new digital network, enabling women to exchange skills and advice on balancing work with a family.

Women Like Us is an award-winning social enterprise, helping women with children find work to fit with family life. It does this by providing frontline career advice and support, as well as access to part-time work through its specialist recruitment service, Timewise Jobs.

Through its new network, Women Like Us will enable thousands of women to exchange their knowledge and skills, to help each other build careers – or start businesses – that can be balanced with caring responsibilities. Women will be able to offer or swap their knowledge and skills through an online portal, and using a range of sharing tools (such as webinars, blogs and forums), to maximise giving, impact and learning.

For example, a retired HR professional could run a webchat on how to address career gaps in preparing a new CV, or a finance officer in the city could host an online Q&A on building a part-time career in financial services. In doing so, founder Emma Stewart aims to harness what she calls the “latent motivation” in many women who have grappled with balancing work and family life, and are keen to share and swap their knowledge and skills.

With an existing community of 32,000 women and 4,000 employers, and with just over a million women in London with dependent children, Women Like Us Careers Online has the potential both to significantly increase the giving of time and skills, and to help many more mums build fulfilling, family-friendly careers.

The award

Women Like Us has been awarded £50,000 to build and launch the online career portal, to develop a network of professional women who will volunteer as career sharers through the businesses they work for, and to pilot in London with a view to expanding across the UK.

Contact

Emma Stewart, director
emma.stewart@womenlikeus.org.uk