Hard Times Send 'Economoms' Back to the Job Market

One tidbit from Harvard Business School, which held a weeklong course this month geared to help women re-enter the workforce: steer clear of the term part time. Use flexible hours instead. "Part time has a connotation of not full commitment," says Timothy Butler, who chairs the Harvard program, which cost attendees $5,000 apiece. Cheaper options include iRelaunch's $125 one-day return-to-work sessions around the country and its new $19.99 webinars. The first topic: What the heck is LinkedIn, and how can it be used as a job-search tool?

Until recently, business networking sites like LinkedIn were a mystery to Lisa Estabrook, 50, who left her advertising job at a bank in Philadelphia when her first child was born 16 years ago. Now she finds herself haunting YourOnRamp, which her husband — who was laid off from a reinsurance firm six weeks ago — heard about from a career counselor at a local church. She rattles off all the networking sites she's trying to get a handle on, including Facebook and Tweeter. Um, make that Twitter. "To my kids," she says, "it's funny to see Mom trying to get with it." (See which businesses are doing well despite the recession.)

In March, Maria Retter, 48, started a part-time job she found through Mom Corps as an office manager in northern Virginia. With a self-employed husband and with their youngest child about to join two others in college, Retter decided she needed steadier work than the Web-designing she had been doing from home. And she is firmly convinced that motherhood has made her a better employee: "If you can handle temper tantrums, then when you have to deal with obnoxious people in an office setting, you say to yourself, 'You remind me of my 2-year-old.' "

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