About iRelaunch
iRelaunch is the pioneering leader in the career reentry field, bringing thousands of mid-career professionals, “relaunchers,” back into the workforce after extended leave.
As a global, full-service career reentry company, iRelaunch works with many of the world’s largest employers to build and expand their in-house career reentry onboarding programs, produces the iRelaunch Return to Work Conference and the iRelaunch Employer Summit, and leads a community of more than 125,000 "relaunchers" in all stages of resuming their careers following career breaks of one to over 20 years.
iRelaunch co-leads the STEM Reentry Task Force, the groundbreaking multi-company career reentry initiative with the Society of Women Engineers. Now in its ninth year, 44 leading employers have joined to launch their career reentry programs.
iRelaunch is recognized as the global authority and thought leader on career reentry and, as the first and largest firm to focus on this market, has had a foundational role in creating the career reentry field. iRelaunch has innovated and pivoted its business focus as the field has evolved from its origin largely as a way to add gender diversity to the workplace to its current role as a recognized track for employers recruiting high-caliber professionals to join their organizations.
Carol Fishman Cohen iRelaunch CEO and Co-founderWhy are employers interested in the relauncher talent pool? They recognize their attributes: they are educated, have great work experience, have worked on teams, with different personalities, under pressure of work deadlines. They are grounded, with a mature perspective. They are not in an exploratory stage of their careers; in fact their career breaks have given them time to reflect on whether they were on the right career path to begin with. When they return, it is after a lot of thought and deliberation about where they can add the most value to an employer.
Our History
iRelaunch was established in 2007. Founders Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin, Harvard Business School grads who had relaunched their careers in 2001 and 2000, respectively after multi-year career breaks (when no one was talking about relaunching!) worked on the earliest return to work programs in 2005 and 2006, even before founding iRelaunch.
After the 2007 publication of their book “Back on the Career Track,” dubbed the “Bible” of Career Reentry, Cohen and Rabin produced their first iRelaunch Return to Work Conference. It was held at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management in suburban Chicago in 2008 with an audience of about 100. Accenture was the first lead sponsor of the iRelaunch Conference and continued to sponsor future conferences.
Just shy of iRelaunch’s 10 year anniversary, iRelaunch CEO and Co-founder Carol Fishman Cohen’s 2015 TEDxBeaconStreet talk was selected by the TED editors to be featured on the big TED platform in mid-2016. The talk “How to get back to work after a career break” struck a chord, packing career reentry strategies, an explanation of relauncher attributes and concerns, and a discussion about employer return to work programs, all into 12 minutes. Both a rallying cry and message of inspiration, the viral talk has been viewed over 3.7 million times, translated into 30 languages and spurred a broader conversation about career breaks and how they are perceived in the workforce. Carol’s Harvard Business Review article, “The 40-Year-Old-Intern” was the first major publication to identify internship-like experiences as an effective way for employers to hire relaunchers, and predicted the proliferation of these programs we see today.
Our Work and Impact
iRelaunch works with employers to build and expand their in-house return to work programs, produces the iRelaunch Return to Work Conferences, and leads a community of more than 125,000 "relaunchers" looking to return to work after career breaks of one to over 20 years.
iRelaunch co-leads the STEM Reentry Task Force with the Society of Women Engineers, the groundbreaking career reentry initiative in its ninth year in which program managers from 44 leading employers to date have joined for top guidance on launching return to work programs at their respective organizations. Corporate giants that have launched their return to work programs through this initiative include Johnson & Johnson, Raytheon Technologies, Apple, Northrop Grumman, Merck, P&G, IBM and Cummins. Over 1,300 relaunchers have participated in Task Force company programs and 85% have been hired when the programs completed.
iRelaunch CEO and Co-founder Carol Fishman Cohen is the author of the Harvard Business Review Magazine article “The 40-Year-Old Intern", regarded as the seminal article on mid-career internships, and nine additional articles for HBR online on career reentry topics.
Cohen has presented on career reentry topics more than 1,500 times and has been featured dozens of times in the major media. Her return to work at Bain Capital after an 11-year career break is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study and iRelaunch is the subject of a Stanford Graduate School of Business case study.
Our Mission and Vision
Today, iRelaunch is an unwavering champion of those who have temporarily left the workforce. We call them “relaunchers.”
The iRelaunch mission since our founding in 2007 is to normalize the career path that includes a career break and reveal this untapped talent pool for what it is: highly educated, uniquely experienced, and extremely motivated.
Our vision is for employers to routinely offboard and onboard employees as they take multiple career breaks over their 60-year careers. Mainstream adoption of employer return to work programs was the first step in reaching this goal. A second major step has been the evolution of returnship (internship-based) programs into direct hire (hired as employees from day one) programs, as hiring relaunchers has proven to be much less risky than employers originally thought. Additionally, more employers are hiring relaunchers through traditional recruiting channels while providing transitional support in the early months of their employment whenever they can.
iRelaunch is a Certified WBENC member and WOSB