Mini-sabbaticals, adult gap years: more employees taking extended work breaks

Mini-sabbaticals. Adult gap years. Micro-retirement. Extended career breaks go by many names and take many forms, from using the time between jobs to explore or taking an employer-approved leave to becoming a digital nomad or saving up for a months-long adventure. Creating space for a reset, whether mental, physical or spiritual, is the common thread. 

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Cost, personal responsibilities and fears of being judged by colleagues, friends and family members are some of the obstacles that prevent people from hitting pause on their work lives and setting out in search of new perspectives, according to sabbatical experts and people who have taken sabbaticals.

American attitudes toward taking time off are different from the ones in much of Europe, where free time and rest are prioritized, said Kira Schrabram, an assistant professor of management at the University of Washington’s business school who studies meaningful and sustainable work. In the European Union, workers are entitled by law to at least 20 days of paid vacation a year.

But more companies are allowing weeks or months of paid or unpaid leave as a way to retain valued employees, according to Schrabram. Seven years ago, she brought her experience researching burnout to the Sabbatical Project, an initiative founded by Harvard Business School senior lecturer DJ DiDonna that promotes sabbaticals as “a sacred human ritual” to which more people should have access.

Read: Sabbaticals can help with talent attraction and retention, say experts

Schrabram, DiDonna and University of Notre Dame professor emeritus Matt Bloom interviewed 50 U.S. professionals who took an extended break from non-academic jobs. From the responses, they identified three types of sabbaticals: working holidays that involved pursuing a passion project; ‘free dives’ that combined exciting adventures with periods of rest; and quests undertaken by burned-out people who engaged in life-changing explorations once they had recovered sufficiently.

More than half of the interview subjects self-funded their hiatuses. In an article for the Harvard Business Review, the researchers made a case for sabbaticals as a tool employers could use to recruit, keep and foster talented workers. But since extended paid leaves aren’t common, “we’re really pushing back on the idea that a sabbatical needs to be sponsored by an employer,” Schrabram said of the Sabbatical Project, which created a network of coaches and mentors to encourage the sabbatical-curious.

Roshida Dowe was 39 years old and working as a corporate lawyer in California when she got laid off in 2018. Instead of seeking a new job right away, she decided to spend a year travelling. Struck by how many people asked how she managed it, Dowe decided to try working as an online career-break coach.

Read: How Shopify is supporting employee well-being with additional paid time off

She and Stephanie Perry, a former pharmacy technician who also took a gap year to travel and found a calling in coaching, co-founded ExodUS Summit, a virtual conference for Black women to talk about taking a sabbatical or moving abroad. Speakers at the event discuss both practical considerations like finances, safety and health care, and more philosophical topics like the value of rest and breaking free of intergenerational trauma.

Showcasing women who set off to see the world is powerful because “a lot of us aren’t open to possibilities we haven’t been shown before,” said Dowe, who moved to Mexico City as part of her own reinvention. “When I coach women who are looking to take a sabbatical, the main thing they’re looking for is permission,” she said.

For Perry, a 2014 vacation in Brazil served as a catalyst for when she met people staying in her hostel who were travelling for months, not days. She researched budget travel and found people making it work on $40 a day. Prior to that, “I thought for sure people who traveled long term were all trust fund babies,” she said.

Read: A third of employees believe full flexibility is best working model: survey

Cost is a common obstacle for people considering a break. There are creative ways around that, said Perry, who has legal residency in Mexico and an apartment in Bogota, Colombia.

“Housesitting is the reason I can work very little and travel a lot,” she said. Perry, who has a YouTube channel where she posts videos about traveling or becoming an expat as a Black American, raises money through her subscribers to sponsor Black women on sabbaticals.

Taylor Anderson is a certified financial planner based in Vancouver, Wash., specializing in helping clients plan for sabbaticals. She said many of the same principles apply to saving up for one as they do to saving for retirement. Both require financial discipline as well as a willingness to recognize when it’s safe to spend.

“We talk about money breathing. Sometimes it’s inhaling, sometimes it’s exhaling,” Anderson, who has experienced the benefits of a sabbatical reboot herself, said. “Often we find that people do have money saved, but they’re afraid to spend it. The question of, ‘What is enough?’ is really difficult.”

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