Designing the gap
Career gaps aren’t empty: disrupting unconscious bias for cancer survivors
To help young adult cancer survivors bridge the inevitable career gaps, I’m starting a nonprofit called NED.
Introducing NED
Three years ago, when I posted a message to my LinkedIn network that I needed help returning to work after a hiatus for cancer treatment, I thought I’d resume my career within a year. I never foresaw that returning to work would be as formidable as going through treatment. Prior to my diagnosis, I’d been working as a creative director at Uber. But my “cancer work” had created a five-year gap on my resume, a gap I still haven’t been able to bridge despite a concerted effort. This gap continues to grow.
How can young adult cancer survivors, many of whom are establishing career paths when diagnosed, re-enter the workforce?
How does someone address their resume gap when trying to return to work after cancer?
Can survivors talk openly about it, or should we hide our past?
Time off for cancer treatment is not the same as taking family leave or embarking on a six-month adventure around the world. While these are more publicly acknowledged and accepted breaks in one’s career, the length of time for cancer treatment is unpredictable. Not everyone is willing to discuss it in the context of a work environment, and the weight and darkness of the narrative follows survivors everywhere.
Workplace stigma, unconscious bias, and misperceptions about abilities, productivity, and reliability force cancer survivors to carefully consider how our cancer stories are shared with potential employers.
For these reasons, I’m starting a nonprofit organization called NED to help young adult survivors (ages 20–39) bridge the inevitable career gaps that come with cancer experience. I’ve chosen to call this organization NED because it stands for both “No Evidence of Disease,” the term used by medical professionals and “Not Entirely Dead,” an inside joke among survivors.
The organization’s aim is twofold:
- to empower survivors to return to work with confidence
- to educate and enable employers to hire more inclusively
NED provides an opportunity to build mutual understanding and trust between survivors and employers. It’s also a social support service that young adult survivors need. The organization offers them a safe place to cope with post-treatment experiences together. It disrupts the outdated models of support services and reaches survivors at their points of need.
NED is a collaborative space where employers will be proud to participate. It connects them with a group of potential employees who have unique experiences during which they have cultivated life-saving skills and competencies. These competencies–including ownership, decision making, self-management, teamwork, dedication, and resilience–help survivors get through the toughest situations. Coincidentally, they are important skills that most companies are looking for in their employees.
NED is not only about diversity, equity and inclusion that is highly valued in the industry now, but also about fighting the invisible barriers that haven’t yet been identified by most companies.
How does NED work?
Survivors join NED voluntarily by donating their professional stories. In return, they will get a job title to match their work experience if it’s needed to mediate the career gap on their resume. Unlike traditional jobs, the years at NED transparently reflect the years survivors have been fighting cancer.
NED grows organically by crowdsourcing survivors’ stories. The larger the company is, the more significant impact we can create for cancer survivors. Eventually, survivors and employers will build this community together as a social service with peer groups and career support.
Life Interrupted
In 2016, at the age of 33, I was diagnosed with cancer. At the time I was focused on my career in the tech industry, leading a design team in a highly competitive company in Silicon Valley. Like many cancer patients though, I had to leave my day job to focus on the job of a lifetime: treatment.
In October 2018, after a series of treatments and setbacks, including a dozen cycles of chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, and three surgeries, I flew from Beijing to Indianapolis to meet the world-famous oncologist, Dr. Laurence Einhorn. I was convinced that Dr. Einhorn was the only doctor who could save my life.
It has been three years since I had a reboot in Indiana. I am NED — cancer-free. In this time I’ve returned to design school to focus on research studies in social good and practice teaching and professorship. I’ve trained to become a distance runner and just finished the Seattle Marathon this past Thanksgiving (running a marathon is recognized as the №1 cancer survivor cliche activity globally!). Rather than hiding my diagnosis, I’ve become a visible cancer survivor. I hope to be a mentor and advocate of the community.
Like many young adult cancer fighters and survivors, I do have one ultimate goal — regaining a sense of normalcy. For me, that means finding value and purpose again, including contributing to society and returning to work. Cancer has upended everything in mine and my family’s lives, but it hasn’t changed why I love the work I do.
Second Chances
“Now that I’ve survived I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.”
– Suleika Jaouad, New York Times bestselling author of Between Two Kingdoms
Cancer isn’t something that happens once. It permanently changes a person’s life. When someone has beaten cancer, there’s often an expectation that it’s time to live a BIG life — to travel the world, devote a life to saving the planet, or at the very least, finish a marathon. Survivors are reluctant to be victims of the illness, they are encouraged to do what anyone else can do. There’s also a mentality that because survivors have been given a second chance at life, we’ve got to make the most of it. But what many cancer survivors crave more than anything is quite the opposite — a return to normalcy, resuming the life we had before the cancer diagnosis.
Returning to work after cancer can enhance psychological well-being and represent regaining a sense of normality and control. Work is essential for an individual’s identity and provides a social connection. However, a career gap caused by cancer is systemically problematic in the hiring process and makes cancer survivors unattractive.
Minding The Gap
Even for healthy people, the long-term unemployed face steep odds. Peter Cappelli, the director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found that some employers regard applicants with long periods of unemployment unfavorably — even if many are reluctant to admit it. He says: “Employers don’t often articulate why but the idea, they believe, is that people who are out of work are damaged in some way, which is why they are out of work.”
Stigma and workplace discrimination have been identified as prominent challenges to employment following cancer. Stigmatizing perceptions can create beliefs that some individuals are less valuable, less capable, and have less to offer to society. For example, cancer survivors have been characterized as burdens to the health care system, the workplace, and their co-workers across international contexts. Furthermore, survivors’ professional networks may erode since many tend to socially vanish to coordinate cancer care for months or years.
Returning to work following an illness such as cancer is most likely to be successful if there is open communication, transparency, trust, and a rhetorical working partnership between employers and employees. Both groups note a need for improved communication and understanding, education about workplace accommodation, more community resources and support regarding return to work processes.
Shifting Narratives
Career gaps are common in the workplace. But unlike the intended plans such as having a baby or going to graduate school, a career gap caused by cancer isn’t by choice. Anecdotes from “medical leaves” at different hospitals are neither conversational nor advantageous to a career. The discomfort of the narrative is a communication barrier in most cultural norms around health and suffering. It takes empathy, in-depth understanding, and education among all stakeholders to fix this communication gap.
Conversely, the unfavorable stories that survivors tend to hide in the hiring process are often inspiring to the public. Fight-to-live stories are heroic because people recognize fighting cancer is probably the most difficult “job” in the world. For instance, American cyclist Lance Armstrong returned to his career and became the only rider to win seven Tour de France titles after beating cancer.
In fact, there are many similarities between a regular job and fighting a major life disruption. Young adult survivors must multitask on a regular basis, including choosing the appropriate treatment protocol after diagnosis; understanding health insurance benefits during and after treatment; adjusting to permanent physical effects, such as disability or infertility; managing mental health post-treatment; confronting lasting uncertainties; and coping with unemployment, sometimes long after treatment ends. Fighting cancer is a full-time job with no mental health breaks or vacations.
Calling All Cancer Survivors And Employers
NED starts from an unintended personal experience. Yet my experience is also personal to 630,000 other young adult cancer survivors and their families in the U.S. and millions worldwide. Demolishing invisible bias is the least we can do to help survivors move forward with life.
If you are a recruiter or a hiring manager, a survivor, or a co-worker, please don’t hesitate to join this societal change by helping someone around you get connected or educated. As the founder of NED and a cancer survivor, it means the world to me, and many other cancer survivors.
If you like the initiative, please be sure to follow NED or contact me: eason@uw.edu.
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https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-in-young-adults/key-statistics.html
