Reboot: How to Manage Career Breaks and Return with Greater Success

Summary

'It's hard for me to say this, knowing the great feedback most of my peers had for you, but at this stage for our business in India, we just require someone who has some more entertainment marketing experience than you do. Hence, we wouldn't be taking your candidature forward for this position.'

When Issac quit his dream job of Head of Marketing at PUMA in 2015 and took a career break to study screenwriting in New York, little did he know what he had signed up for.

Over the next eighteen months, he would face over a hundred rejections from famed brands, headhunters, publishers, talent agencies and producers. After being rejected in the final interview rounds of brands like Uber, Netflix and Airbnb, he slowly and steadily clawed his way back into a mainstream career. Issac went on to lead a team of over a hundred people at Discovery, having built their direct-to-consumer OTT business in Asia-Pacific (discovery+), and has authored two books - all in a span of five years since that career break.

Over the past two years, Issac spoke to more than fifty working professionals, all of whom went through a break in their career for various reasons. Reboot is an intimate, honest and rich compendium of all those experiences, mistakes, lows and highs that people confronted with a career break go through. It shares the message that no matter the odds you are up against, a career break is always temporary, and, in many cases, it can even prove to be life-changing.