The Second Job Nobody Puts on a CV
Sass Allard is a strategic coach and change consultant helping leaders and high-performing women navigate complex change with clarity and resilience. She brings over 20 years of experience in global organisations, offering practical insights to support meaningful transformation and growth.
She had been on hold with a GP surgery since twenty past seven and was still on hold when her brother rang to offer his views on their mother's medication. Her 17-year-old sent several text messages with increasingly demanding questions and requests. By eleven, she was chairing a meeting that involved the CEO. Sound familiar?
The ONS counts around 1.4 million sandwich carers in the UK, meaning people raising a dependent child while also providing unpaid care to an older, ill, or disabled relative.
Sixty-one per cent are women, and just over half are aged 45 to 64, with more than a quarter providing twenty hours a week or more on top of caring for their children. Carers UK found that 69 percent of employed carers felt unable to give their careers the attention they wanted, and 21 percent had taken a more junior or lower-paid role as a result.
This often gets filed under welfare. It isn’t viewed as a commercial problem, and that starts to quietly cost organisations their most experienced women.
Change management, without the job title
Running a parent's care means coordinating across health services, social care, and family members holding incompatible views, on incomplete information, with no authority over anyone involved, against a situation that alters without notice at a pace somebody else sets. There is no contingency budget and nowhere to escalate. The negotiation is often with an elderly person whose settled position is that nothing needs to change at all.
What gets built doing this is the capability organisations claim to be short of, which is judgement under ambiguity and the capacity to keep several conflicting interests in play without losing your footing. It shows up nowhere on a curriculum vitae (CV), and it is never once mentioned in a conversation about succession.
Why it stays off the record
The concealment is deliberate and mostly rational. A woman disclosing this in her forties or fifties adds to a set of assumptions already forming about her availability and her appetite for what comes next. She has watched what happened to colleagues who brought their ‘problems’ into the workplace, and she has concluded that silence will cost her less.
Organisations therefore lose these women at the point of their greatest value. Carers UK's most recent research found 47 percent of working carers considering reducing their hours or leaving altogether, and very few of them will say why at the time.
Stages worth working through
Treat disclosure as a decision. Telling your employer you have a caring responsibility that requires certain arrangements gives them something to act on. Narrating the whole situation invites an assessment of your capacity that you did not request. Aviva's research found 89 percent of UK adults rated a supportive line manager as what mattered most, which makes who you tell far more consequential than how much you tell them.
Work out what will still be there later. A stretch project turned down this year is usually still available next year. Sleep, health, and the people who hold you up do not operate that way, and some of that damage does not undo. Work commitments arrive with dates attached while everything else waits quietly, which is why the quiet things are what get dropped first.
Ask for the specific thing. Organisations are often unequipped to manage distress, but respond reasonably well to requests. Thursday mornings until March is something a manager can say yes to, whereas anything vaguer puts the job of inventing a solution on them, and they will decline rather than guess.
For the organisations losing them
Twelve per cent of employees report having any paid carer's leave, and a third say their workplace has no carer policy at all. Where policies do exist, the difficulty is usually that nobody feels safe using them. People take their cue from what they have watched happen to someone else, so the useful question for any leadership team is whether a manager has ever handled this disclosure well in front of an audience.
This group is growing, driven by later childbearing and longer lives, and it maps almost exactly onto the population organisations say they are developing for senior roles.
None of this appears on a CV. Holding a complicated situation together with no budget, no authority, and no end date is work most organisations would pay well for, and a great many women are doing it before they have even arrived at their desks.
Read more from Sass Allard
Sass Allard, Strategic Coach & Change Consultant
Sass Allard works at the intersection of leadership, behaviour, and wellbeing, supporting individuals and organisations as they navigate demanding periods of change. Her background spans two decades in global companies, where she has helped senior leaders strengthen culture, clarity, and capability. She brings a grounded understanding of how hormonal shifts shape women’s experience at work without limiting the broader conversation. As a UN Women delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women, she brings a global lens to agency and progress. Sass writes about adaptation, resilience, and the practical shifts that create real movement in work and life.
