From October 2020 to August 2021, I stepped away from my career to provide full-time care for a close family member during cancer treatment. I list that career break on my CV openly, with a one-line explanation. Most career advice says to hide gaps or spin them as freelancing. I chose the opposite, and this article explains why listing a career break on a CV is a values decision worth making, what the year actually taught me, and why companies that penalise gaps are telling you something useful about their culture.
There’s a line on my CV between my role at Critical Software and my role at One Hundred Group. It reads: “Family Caregiving Sabbatical | Oct 2020 to Aug 2021 | Full-time support for a close family member during cancer treatment.”
One line. No spin. No euphemism.
The standard advice for anyone with a career break on their CV is to minimise it. List some freelance work to fill the gap. Rearrange dates to make the gap shorter. Call it a “professional development sabbatical” and hope nobody asks. According to the MyPerfectResume 2025 Career Gaps Report, 64% of workers with career gaps prefer to keep the break off their application entirely, discussing it only if the hiring manager brings it up. Only 20% address a gap proactively in their materials.
I’m in the 20%.
Why Put a Career Break on Your CV Instead of Hiding It?
Because hiding it would mean treating the most important thing I did that year as something to be ashamed of.
I left my job to take care of someone I loved during the worst year of their life. I managed their treatment schedule, drove them to every appointment, handled the logistics that cancer patients can’t handle themselves, and held everything together while watching someone I cared about fight for their life. That year required more sustained resilience, faster prioritisation under pressure, and more emotionally intelligent decision-making than any marketing role I’ve ever held.
Hiding that experience behind fake freelance dates or a vague gap would be dishonest, and it would signal to any employer that I’m willing to sanitise my life for their comfort, which is exactly the kind of compliance I’m not interested in performing.
Listing the career break on my CV is a filter. Companies that see it and move forward understand that people have lives outside of work, while the ones that hesitate are showing me something useful about how they treat employees when life gets complicated.
Why Does Career Break Stigma Still Exist?
Almost half of all workers (47%) have experienced a career break at some point, according to the same MyPerfectResume report. It’s staggeringly common. Yet 30% of employers still view career gaps negatively, and 38% of people returning to work worry about how the gap will affect their prospects.
The stigma persists because hiring is still built on a narrative of continuous upward trajectory. The ideal candidate, in the implicit model most hiring processes use, is someone who has never stopped, never stepped sideways, never prioritised anything over career progression. That model hasn’t been realistic for decades, but it still shapes how résumés get read and how candidates get screened.
Research from Applied found that 51% of people who took career breaks of six months or more believe they gained transferable skills during the break. Yet the stigma persists because hiring processes are still designed to screen for continuity rather than capability. Source: Applied, Career Gap Research
The gap between reality (47% of workers have breaks) and perception (30% of employers view them negatively) is where the stigma lives. It’s not based on evidence that people with career breaks are less capable, it’s based on a model of what a career is supposed to look like that hasn’t caught up with how people actually live.
What Did the Break Actually Teach Me?
I want to be careful here because I’m not arguing that caregiving is secretly a professional development opportunity. It’s not. It’s exhausting, emotionally devastating, and nobody should have to frame the hardest year of their life as a “growth experience” to satisfy a hiring manager’s curiosity.
That said, I came out of it with capabilities I didn’t have before, and they genuinely affect how I work.
- Sustained pressure management. Marketing operates under deadlines and quarterly targets. Caregiving during cancer treatment operates under a different kind of pressure: the sustained, months-long kind where there’s no “after launch” relief point and no weekend where the urgency stops. Having managed that, the pressure of a content calendar feels calibrated differently. I don’t panic under quarter-end stress the way I might have before, because I’ve operated under worse.
- Ruthless prioritisation. When you’re managing treatment logistics, family communication, insurance, medication schedules, and your own wellbeing simultaneously, you learn to identify what actually matters and drop everything else without guilt. I brought that skill directly into how I manage content priorities. I wrote about building a content system as a solo marketer, and the prioritisation discipline behind that system was partially forged during the caregiving year.
- Emotional intelligence under duress. Communicating with family members in crisis. Having difficult conversations with medical professionals. Supporting someone through fear without absorbing it yourself. These are soft skills in the professional sense, but there’s nothing soft about developing them.
What Does Penalising Career Gaps Tell You About a Company?
Here’s the argument I want hiring managers to sit with.
If your hiring process penalises a candidate for taking a year to care for a dying family member, you’re not screening for capability, you’re screening for the appearance of continuous devotion to work, and those are very different things. The candidate with the unbroken timeline might have been less effective during a personal crisis but kept showing up and underperforming, whereas the candidate who stepped away, dealt with the crisis properly, and came back with full focus made the braver and arguably more professional choice.
A company that reads a caregiving gap and moves forward without hesitation is a company that sees its employees as humans with lives. That’s the company I want to work for. Not because I expect to need another sabbatical, but because the way a company treats an obvious caregiving gap is a proxy for how it treats every human complication: illness, parental leave, mental health, burnout.
The career break didn’t diminish my capability. It preceded some of the strongest results of my career. The gap on my CV is followed by the best work on my CV, and any hiring process that would have screened me out based on the gap would have missed everything that came after.
How Should You Talk About a Career Break in Interviews?
For anyone facing this question, here’s the practical framing I use.
State the facts plainly. “I took a year away from work to provide full-time care for a family member during cancer treatment.” No apology, no excessive detail, no emotional performance. Just the truth.
If asked what you learned or how you stayed sharp, answer honestly but briefly. You can note the skills you developed (sustained pressure management, prioritisation, emotional intelligence), but don’t oversell the break as a training program. It wasn’t. It was a human situation, and you handled it.
If the interviewer reacts negatively or probes uncomfortably, take that as information. An interviewer who can’t handle a straightforward answer about family caregiving is showing you what the company’s culture looks like when employees face personal challenges. You’re learning something valuable about whether this is a place you want to work.
The broader principle is that a career is not a gap-free timeline, it’s a body of work. The work speaks for itself when the work is good, and no gap in the timeline changes the quality of what came before and after it.
Frequently asked questions
Listing a career break on a CV is a personal decision, but the case for transparency is strong. Hiding gaps requires fabrication or misdirection, which creates risk if the truth surfaces during reference checks or interview conversations. A clear, one-line explanation (including the reason and timeframe) normalises the break and filters for employers who value honesty. According to MyPerfectResume’s 2025 data, only 20% of workers with career gaps address them proactively in their application materials, which means doing so actually distinguishes you from the majority who hide.
State the facts clearly and without apology. “I took time away from work to provide full-time care for a family member during a serious illness.” If asked what you learned, you can briefly note skills like sustained pressure management, crisis prioritisation, or emotional intelligence under duress, but don’t oversell the break as professional development. It was a human situation handled with commitment. If the interviewer reacts negatively, treat that as useful information about the company’s culture around employee wellbeing and life outside of work.
Career break stigma is real but declining. Research shows that 47% of US workers have experienced a career break and 30% of employers still view them negatively, but the gap between these figures reflects outdated hiring norms rather than evidence-based concerns about capability. Companies increasingly recognise that continuous employment is not a reliable proxy for competence, and hiring processes that penalise caregiving gaps disproportionately affect women, who are three times more likely than men to take career breaks for caregiving responsibilities.
