Why a Career Break Is a Smart Move, with Katrina McGhee
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Taking time away from work can feel risky, but Find Your Dream Job guest Katrina McGhee says a career break is often a smart move. She explains why intentional time off — whether planned or unexpected — can help you recover from burnout, realign with your values, or pursue long-delayed life goals. Katrina also shares why employers are increasingly supportive of breaks and how you can position yours as an advantage in your job search.
Katrina recommends starting with a clear purpose statement and designing your break around what you most want from the experience. She covers practical steps, such as setting goals, planning finances, and allowing space for both decompression and reentry. With the right approach, Katrina says, a career break won’t hold you back. It can renew your energy, build your confidence, and set you up for long-term success.
About Our Guest:
- Katrina McGhee is a sabbatical coach who helps professionals turn a career break into a strategic advantage.
- Check out Katrina’s book, Taking A Career Break For Dummies
Resources in This Episode:
Connect with Katrina on LinkedIn
Transcript
Find Your Dream Job, Episode 521:
Why a Career Break Is a Smart Move, with Katrina McGhee
Airdate: October 1, 2025
Mac Prichard:
This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life.
I’m your host, Mac Prichard. I’m also the founder of Mac’s List. It’s a job board in the Pacific Northwest that helps you find a fulfilling career.
Every Wednesday, I talk to a different expert about the tools you need to get the work you want.
You may worry that taking a break from work during your career can hurt you professionally.
Katrina McGhee is here to talk about why a career break is a smart move.
She’s a sabbatical coach who helps professionals turn a career break into a strategic advantage.
Katrina has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and NBC.
She joins us from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Katrina, let’s start with definitions. What do you mean by a career break?
Katrina McGhee:
Great question, Mac. It’s simply put, an intentional period of unemployment.
And it’s going to involve quitting your job to focus on things outside of the work that you were doing. So when we’re talking about a career break, some people might know the term as a sabbatical, although technically a sabbatical is a leave of absence provided by your employer.
A lot of people use that term to describe a career break. So it’s sort of interchangeable. People might’ve also heard the term adult gap year or mini retirement, and those are all referring to these intentional periods of unemployment where you’re shifting your focus away from your work into other parts of your life.
Mac Prichard:
And can this happen if you’re laid off or you’ve been let go? Is that an opportunity for a career break as well?
Katrina McGhee:
Absolutely. So a lot of people don’t know this, but it actually can be an opportunity to lean into this break, so really the essence is that piece of intentionality. So if you are let go and unexpectedly start the break, but choose to lean into this space and think about, how can I make this time work for me?
What do I want to get out of this time versus just jumping right back into sort of a panicked job search mode? You are actually transitioning to being on a career break. And so I like to say you’re on a break. You just didn’t choose your start date.
Mac Prichard:
So it can happen either by choice or maybe your circumstances change, but there’s a period where you’re going to take a break. What are the most common reasons you see in your work, Katrina, with people, for why these breaks happen?
Katrina McGhee:
There are some really interesting themes that come up, and I like to talk about them as the three Bs. So there are three sort of main motivators I’ve seen over the last eight years that draw people into breaks. First, you have burnout. And you can think about this as being beyond your capacity. So this might be a mental burnout. It could be physical or it could be emotional.
Maybe you’ve lost someone or suffered something sort of like really catastrophic in life, and you just feel like you are beyond your emotional capacity to be working and sort of being on the hamster wheel, grinding it out. Or you might have the physical or mental burnout that so many of us are experiencing in our work.
The second B is betrayal, which is kind of a dramatic word, but really it talks about the sense of misalignment, which can feel like a lot of tension. So there is a misalignment between what you find fulfilling or what you say you value and what you’re showing up with in your work.
So that might look like feeling like you’re not where you’re supposed to be in your work and feeling like, I’m not doing the work. That really lights me up. And that’s something I really want to experience.
Or it could just be that the place you’re at feels like there’s a misalignment in the way you’re running your life. Maybe you value your health. You value connections. But your work is not allowing you the space to take care of yourself or to spend quality time with people that you care about.
And the last B is Blossom. And this is really about wanting to invest your time, your energy, and your resources into many other parts of your life outside of just working and making money. It’s about having life goals. It’s about wanting to move towards something and create space to have a really amazing experience of your life.
And it’s worth noting that it’s a Venn diagram, so you can absolutely be experiencing more than one of these Bs at the same time. I was actually experiencing a mix of all three, but it’s totally normal to have more than one. But these are the main reasons that people end up taking a break or deciding to take a break.
Mac Prichard:
Okay, so the three Bs, burnout, betrayal, and blossoming, and one or more of them can apply. How does knowing which one you’re experiencing help you both plan your break and do your long-term career planning?
Katrina McGhee:
Yeah, so it’s important to know what you want to get out of your break. So if you know why you are wanting this time off, first of all, it can be very validating to be able to articulate why I need this time because it can feel so overwhelming. And a lot of times, people have resistance to owning that they want or need a break because they feel like it’s a commentary on their worthiness or their ability to succeed or excel.
A lot of people are high achieving in their careers. And so it can feel like a very tough personal decision to think about even taking time off. So validation, number one. But number two, it helps you understand what’s on the other side of a break. So with your motivation, you’re able to understand, if I’m feeling burnt out or if I’m feeling beyond capacity, how might I move through this time?
What do I need to design the break to do for me so that I can experience benefits? Benefits could be things like having better health. It could be moving past a really hard season of life. There are many, many benefits. I could go into more of them. But really understanding what B or Bs you’re experiencing will help give context for what you want to do with this time off and what could be positively waiting for you on the other side.
Mac Prichard:
I want to talk about those benefits in a moment. Before we get there, Katrina, how do employers look at career breaks? What are you hearing from hiring managers and employers?
Katrina McGhee:
I would say, Mac, that it is really, it is truly a trend that is gaining a lot of momentum. I have clients landing exciting jobs, you know, even in today’s job market. I think the Great Resignation really started paving the way for this trend to really pick up and for this momentum to build. I’ve been doing this for eight years. What I see now is completely different than what I saw in 2017.
Again, even with the challenging job market. And I’m seeing a lot of positive receptivity to this from employers. More employers are also offering paid sabbaticals so that their best, high-potential candidates don’t have to leave the company to take a break, so that they can do it and return to the company. And there are trends that show and stats that show this is a growing movement.
In 2022, LinkedIn launched the Career Break feature. Over a million people snapped up the opportunity and started listing Career Breaks. That number is now well over two million. Bank of America, a very big employer, started offering a sabbatical in 2023. Within six months, they had 5,000 people take advantage of that benefit.
And even as recently as this year, the Harvard Business Review launched a four-part series on the transformational power of sabbaticals and how it’s also good for organizations to be investing in their people, taking this time off, and sort of fostering their own growth, development, creativity, and coming back stronger than ever.
So more people are taking it, more employers have appreciation for it, and that gap that people worry about and feel stigmatized by is becoming less of a thing every day.
Mac Prichard:
And why do you think that’s happening? Why do you think employers are more open and supportive of career breaks than they were a decade ago? What’s changed?
Katrina McGhee:
Yeah. Well, I think one, people are demanding it, right? People are demanding time away. I think the way that we’re living and working, it’s an always-on culture these days. And I think it is absolutely not sustainable. I think employers lag behind the people. So the people are like, I need time out. I’m burnt out. Life is happening. I cannot be juggling all these balls without dropping them. I need to step away and kind of regain focus and take care of myself.
But I think that employers are now seeing the benefit of people who return from those breaks. They have way more motivation, inspiration. If they’ve been able to take a sabbatical through their company, loyalty can be deepened through that experience and feeling like their employer, on some level, cares about them. But also, they come back refreshed and beyond burned out.
They’re ready to dive in and have an impact and come with a new perspective. And I think employers are finally starting to see that benefit and wanting to support people in navigating life with this always-on sort of like frenetic pace that we’re all living and working in.
Mac Prichard:
Okay, I want to pause and take a break. And when we return, Katrina, I want to return to the benefits to people who are considering a break and the goals they might consider setting for that experience.
So stay with us. When we come back, Katrina McGee will continue to share her advice on why a career break is a smart move.
We’re back in the Mac’s List Studio.
I’m talking with Katrina McGee. She’s a sabbatical coach who helps professionals turn a career break into a strategic advantage.
Katrina has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and NBC.
And she joins us from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Katrina, before the break, we were talking about our break here on the show, why a career break is a smart move.
And we talked about how they happen, reasons why people choose to take them, how employers think about breaks, and how that’s changed over the last decade or so.
And you meant, we closed that first segment with you making, sharing the benefits to employers of people who come back after a career break.
Let’s talk about the benefits to people who are going to take a break, and especially what kind of goals do you encourage people to set when they’ve made the choice and they’re ready to take time away from their regular job?
Katrina McGhee:
Yeah, I think the biggest, most important goal is to design your break for your own version of success. So a lot of people get tripped up on wanting to make it like Instagram sexy or have that perfect LinkedIn post where they’ve got that really impressive accolade that just makes their break feel so justified.
Like scrap all of that and make the goal about you and what you most want and need to get from this time. And, you know, when it comes to what’s waiting for you on the other side of a break or what benefits you could have, I mean, the question is like, “What can’t a break do for you?”
I have seen many people come back with 100% charge. So our batteries, always at 10%, 25%, we get up to that 30% charge. We’re unplugging, and we’re just running. Imagine coming back to your work life at 100%, coming back with healthy habits and a new baseline for what you require, and being able to sleep through the night and wake up refreshed and excited, feeling really connected and involved in the people who you love most, having quality time in this one precious life of yours to spend it with people that you care about.
Having a new identity that goes beyond just who you are and the title or the role that you’ve held, seeing yourself as a whole person that is worthy, separate of just hitting your achievements at work and impressing people and getting promoted, and being able to have dreams like hiking Mount Kilimanjaro or becoming a certified yoga teacher in Bali, which I actually did.
Being able to really live into that and experience and fulfill dreams you might have had when you were a kid that you thought it was just too impossible or too late to ever achieve. I think at the end of the day, a break gets you back on track for the life that you really want to live instead of the life that you think you should be living.
Mac Prichard:
So how do you sort that out? Those are all wonderful goals, but for a listener or viewer who’s thinking about this, what steps would you encourage someone to take in order to get clear about what they want to get from a career break?
Katrina McGhee:
The easiest first step that you could possibly take is to think about your purpose. So you want to have an understanding of the motivation and the why behind taking a break. Because ultimately, any break that fulfills that bigger purpose is going to be successful.
So for a lot of my clients, they hit this place mid-career where they’ve got the gold stars, they’ve hit a lot of achievements, but they’re looking at their life and they’re looking back at the first half saying, “That was great, but like, I don’t want more of this. I want something different.” Or maybe they doubled down on somebody else’s version of success, and they feel like what they want to experience in their life is different.
They kind of feel off track in a way. And so this break is a chance for them to get their life back on track. So their purpose statement will be something like, “To be able to pour into myself and my well-being as I get clear on what I want for the second half of my life.”
If you’re able to do that on a break, it doesn’t matter how many trips you took or didn’t take. It doesn’t matter what sexy things you did or didn’t do. You’re going to come back, and your whole life is going to be different for the better. And it’s going to give you a better experience for the rest of your life.
So think about your purpose statement, number one, and think about three to four themes or pillars that are going to support that purpose. It might be leaning into learning, having adventure, quality time, and connection.
Being able to explore whatever your purpose, statement, and themes are, those are going to give you the cheat code to design a break that’s going to be successful, no matter what happens on that break.
Mac Prichard:
So, know your purpose statement, identify your themes. What about length? Is there an ideal length for a career break, Katrina?
Katrina McGhee:
Absolutely. It will be a very personal decision, but the average that I see is six months to 12 months. So I’ll give you a magic number, Mac. Thirty days, the first 30 days is a very tumultuous period. So you want to be able to go through those first 30 days having the space to know that your break is going to continue. So I would recommend a minimum of three months because the first 90 days are actually a decompression period.
So it will take you up to 90 days to really feel like you’re on a break and to have sort of let go of that maybe crispy, crusty, burned-out layer and sort of like have that renewal of that like new you emerging. But the average I see is six to 12 months. It’s a really great amount of time.
If you have goals of traveling or maybe even upskilling, having an adventure, taking a road trip with your family, like if there’s something meaningful that you want to do, it gives you enough time to decompress, have that meaningful experience, but then also have a thoughtful reentry so that you have time to prepare to come back strong and ready to hit the job market and start doing your search.
I will give you the anchor points. The shortest break I’ve coached was seven weeks, and the longest, two years. So I see a whole spectrum. There’s no right or wrong on that. And about 50% of my clients end up changing the length of time once their break starts. So I say, get the finances together. Estimate how much it would cost to take the break you think you want.
But also know it’s okay if you change your mind once you get into the break and you realize you want a little bit more time or a little bit less time than you originally thought.
Mac Prichard:
So allow time at the beginning to adjust to the break and time for reentry when you will do a job search, and think about what comes after the break, and make that happen. You mentioned finances. What kind of financial planning do you recommend for someone who’s considering a career break of six to 12 months or even longer?
Katrina McGhee:
A lot of my clients have a financial advisor or choose to work with a financial advisor in this experience because they oftentimes have been making some smart money moves. They have retirement, they might have investments, they might have rental property.
There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, and so they can work with an expert to really figure out what happens as their passive income coming in while I’m taking this time off. What can I afford? What is the impact to my retirement going to be?
But ultimately, I think the most important thing is to start with, “How much do I think this break would cost?” Because sometimes imagining that number as a really big number that is not concrete can be the reason that people never take a break. It’s like, “It’s too much money. It would just be so much money. I could never, could never.” They actually have the money a lot of times, but they can’t give themselves permission to spend it.
Framing that as an investment in your well-being, understanding what that investment number is. So when I did my math, for example, it was $38,000 to take the year off that I dreamed of and wanted to travel around the world. That was really motivating.
And I actually did not have the money, but having that specific number helped me save $40,000 in 18 months so that I could take the break, even though I only had $1,500 in my bank account when I started with that dream.
So it’s totally possible, but I would say talk to an expert if you feel like you really want to get crystal clear in your specific situation. But the first financial step everyone should take is figuring out how close or far away from my goal am I? How much money would it cost, potentially, to take the kind of break that I might want and need to take?
Mac Prichard:
So you’ve done the planning, both setting goals and identifying your themes, and looking at money questions. How do you define success at the end? How do you, at the end of the break, Katrina, do you know whether it’s six, 12 months, or longer, that it’s been, that you’ve achieved what you set out to do?
Katrina McGhee:
Well, again, having a purpose statement is such a great checkpoint, right? So you set this purpose statement to maybe get your life back on track and to feel more like yourself. A lot of people have a purpose statement that incorporates some element of wanting to find or rekindle their spark.
And so if you can get to the end, look back at your purpose statement and say, gosh, you know, that was a wild ride. There were some highs, there were some lows, but I feel more like myself than I have in years or decades. Success.
If you can look back at that statement and say, I did that, success. Also, I think if you look back at your break and you say, I don’t regret it, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, which is what I hear over and over again, that also is a success. Being able to say that was a meaningful part of my life, and I absolutely have no regrets about taking that time for myself, amen to you. That I would count as a success as well.
Mac Prichard:
How does taking a break like this benefit your career, and how do you recommend that people talk about it when they’re ready to reenter the workforce?
Katrina McGhee:
Through the professional lens, it helps you come back with a really unique point of view. I think it demonstrates your courage and commitment to being true to yourself, which, when positioned well, is actually a benefit and an asset to an employer.
It gives you a new perspective, and you come back with more innovative ideas. Like everybody else is feeling really burnt out, and they’re running on the hamster wheel, and you got off the hamster wheel, you played in the hamster grass, and you got like super recharged.
And so you come back and you see the world so differently as you’re getting back on that wheel, if you choose to get back on the wheel.
I think you have an interesting story that sets you apart. Part of really crushing it when it comes to the job search post-break, beyond having a reentry period, is using that reentry period to think about what are the benefits I got from my break. I recommend a list of 25.
It can feel like a stretch, but at the end of a break, please take time to list at least 25 benefits you’ve gotten from your break so that you get sold and you really immerse yourself in that confident perspective.
And then think about, “How is my employer going to benefit from me having achieved these?” If you’re restored and recharged, “I’m ready to come in. I’m excited. I’m motivated. If you’re more authentically aligned, I’ve chosen your company because I believe in the mission, and I am in the second chapter of my life. I am here to really focus on and pour into someone and some organization that I believe in, right?”
So, like translating the benefits to you and the benefits to your employer. And also it’s a chance to upscale. Like, that is also something worth spending time on. I had a client who learned a language. He got, you know, not proficient, but like gained some fluency in Spanish and also did a three-month climate change fellowship, which helped launch him into a new version of his career once his break was over.
So don’t underestimate the ability of certifications, learning a language, potentially doing a fellowship, or something like that, to upskill. And that’s a very easy story to tell to a future employer about how it helps you come back better and really be able to achieve more success in your profession.
Mac Prichard:
It’s been a terrific conversation, Katrina. Now tell us what’s next for you.
Katrina McGhee:
I’m continuing my mission to help more people take breaks. That’s what I’m here. That’s what I’m here to do. That’s what I’m about. And, you know, one of the biggest things for me that I see holding people back is a fear of the unknown and feeling sort of overwhelmed with the blank canvas that can be taking this time off.
Like, what would we even really do with this time? And so, you know, I actually have a list that I put together for this very specific reason to create clarity, inspiration, and motivation.
And it’s 45 of the most epic things my clients have actually done on a career break. So we’re talking keeping bees, learning how to keep chickens, starting an animal sanctuary, becoming a certified equine healer, traveling around the world, becoming a certified yoga instructor, and everything in between. And so this list is a really amazing way to get grounded in what could be possible for you. So I’m really excited to share it with your audience.
I think at the end of the day, I’m here to help more people take breaks. So that is exactly what I’m focused on and just furthering that mission.
Mac Prichard:
Well, terrific. We’ll be sure to include a link to that list in the show notes and in the website article on the Mac’s List site. And I know you also invite listeners and viewers to connect with you on LinkedIn.
And when you do reach out to Katrina, please mention that you heard and saw her on Find Your Dream Job.
Now, Katrina, given all the great advice you’ve shared today, what’s the one thing you want our audience to remember about why a career break is a smart move?
Katrina McGhee:
Life well lived goes so much beyond just the work that you do. And so I want you to think about a break as an investment in your wellbeing, in your happiness. You get one chance. This is your one precious life. Please know that taking time away does not set you back.
It actually, in the longterm, moves you forward and gives you a life worth saying at the end of your life. Man, I live that to the fullest. I did the most that I could, and I didn’t wait for my life to start.
Mac Prichard:
Next week, our guest will be Gina Riley.
She’s an executive career strategist and the creator of the Career Velocity™ framework.
Gina is also the author of the new book, Qualified Isn’t Enough.
Thanks to generative AI, you can easily create cover letters, resumes, and other application materials.
But you also risk sounding like anybody else who has an AI account.
Join us next Wednesday when Gina Riley and I talk about why AI can’t make you stand out in your job search and what you should do instead.
Until next time, thanks for letting us help you find your dream job.
This show is produced by Mac’s List.
Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media and creates our transcripts.
Our sound engineer and editor is Matt Fiorillo. And our music is by Freddy Trujillo.
This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.
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