Life Interrupted the Career.
It Didn’t End It.
There is a particular kind of career gap that still makes people nervous. Not because the person lacks skill. Not because they have lost ambition. But because they stepped away.
For motherhood. For caring responsibilities. For health. For family. For a life stage that made work temporarily less possible, less practical or simply less important.
And then, when they are ready to come back, they discover that returning can be harder than leaving.
That is why Godrej Industries Group’s new Gateway returnship programme is worth paying attention to.
For anyone less familiar with the company, Godrej is a major Indian business group with roots going back to 1897. Today, the Godrej Industries Group operates across sectors including consumer goods, real estate, agriculture, chemicals and financial services, serving more than 1.4 billion consumers across 85+ countries. In FY26, the group reported revenues of around US$7.2 billion. Godrej Industries
In other words, this is not a small pilot from a niche employer.
It is a significant organisation deciding that return-to-work deserves structure.
What is Gateway?
Gateway has been launched through the Godrej DEI Lab, the group’s inclusion-focused initiative.
The DEI Lab describes itself as an “experimental space” working both within Godrej Industries Group and across corporate India to build more inclusive workplaces. It has already been researching returnships and women’s career continuity, including through work with the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis at Ashoka University. Godrej DEI Lab
The new Gateway programme is designed to help experienced women return to work after career breaks, with a particular focus on breaks linked to motherhood, marriage, caregiving and other life transitions.
What makes it interesting is the structure around the return.
Rather than simply reopening the recruitment door and expecting returners to slot straight back in, the programme combines structured onboarding, coaching and cohort-based learning.
That tells us something important.
Returning to work is not being treated as a recruitment event. It is being treated as a transition.
And that distinction matters.
A career break does not erase a career
There is still a strange assumption in parts of the working world that time away somehow weakens everything that came before it.
It does not.
Ten years of professional experience does not disappear because somebody spent two years caring for a child.
Leadership skills do not evaporate because someone stepped away to look after a parent.
Commercial judgement is not wiped clean because life temporarily took priority.
But…
Confidence can change.
Networks can weaken.
Technology moves on.
Teams restructure.
Industries evolve.
And somebody returning after a break can very easily feel as though everyone else has continued moving while they have been standing still.
That is where returnships can be useful.
They acknowledge that there may genuinely be a transition to navigate without assuming that the individual has lost their value.
The clever part is the support around the role
This is what stood out most to us at MOCO.
Gateway includes coaching as part of the return itself.
Not as a remedial intervention.
Not as something offered only if somebody starts struggling.
But as part of the structure from the beginning.
That is a very different message.
It says:
You are capable and this transition still deserves support.
Those two things can exist at the same time.
Someone returning after a career break may need space to think about confidence, changed priorities, practical responsibilities, ambition and professional identity.
They may be asking themselves:
Can I still do this?
What has changed while I have been away?
Do I want the same things from my career now?
How do I balance the responsibilities I have today with the ambition I had before?
How do I stop feeling as though I need to prove that I deserve to be here?
Those are not questions an induction handbook is designed to answer.
But they are very real return-to-work questions.
Godrej has been looking at this for a while
Gateway also does not appear out of nowhere.
In 2025, the Godrej DEI Lab worked with the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis on research into returnship programmes and women returning to work after career breaks. The work highlighted returnships as potentially important not just for individuals, but for employers trying to widen senior talent pipelines, improve retention and rethink the design of work itself. Godrej DEI Lab
That is significant.
Because returnships are sometimes spoken about as though they are simply a nice DEI initiative.
They are not.
They are also a talent strategy.
Experienced returners can bring years of professional knowledge into businesses that might otherwise overlook them because their CV is not perfectly continuous.
That is not necessarily a skills problem.
Sometimes it is a recruitment-design problem.
This is bigger than motherhood
Although Gateway is focused on women, the wider lesson is much broader.
Careers are becoming less linear.
People step away for all sorts of reasons.
Parenthood.
Caring.
Bereavement.
Illness.
Burnout.
Relocation.
Family change.
And workplaces are still often designed around the assumption that a successful career moves in one uninterrupted direction.
Study.
Join.
Progress.
Progress again.
Keep going.
No gaps.
No pauses.
No detours.
Real life has never worked like that.
So perhaps our career models need to catch up.
Returnships can help with gender equality too
There is also an important equality point here.
Career breaks are not exclusively a women’s issue, but women are still far more likely to step away from work or reduce their participation because of caring and family responsibilities.
That has consequences.
Not just for income.
For confidence.
For progression.
For pensions.
For access to leadership.
And for the shape of senior talent pipelines.
A returnship programme does not solve all of that.
But it does challenge one of the barriers.
It says a pause does not have to become an exit.
Employers should not make the returner do all the adapting
This may be the biggest lesson for organisations.
If somebody is returning after two, three or five years away, do not quietly expect them to work out everything that changed.
Build the bridge.
Tell them what is different.
Give them realistic onboarding.
Make expectations clear.
Offer meaningful work.
Give them someone to ask.
Create space for learning.
And importantly, support the manager too.
Because returnships succeed partly through the person managing the returner.
Managers need to know how to rebuild confidence without patronising somebody.
How to stretch without overwhelming.
How to discuss flexibility without quietly lowering expectations.
And how to recognise that support and capability are not opposites.
Cohort-based learning is clever too
Gateway also uses cohort-based learning.
That might sound like a small detail.
It is not.
Returning after a career break can be lonely.
There can be a sense that everyone else knows what they are doing and you are the only person trying to remember how any of this works. A cohort changes that. It creates shared experience.
It gives people somewhere to say:
“I feel rusty.”
“I’m nervous.”
“I don’t know whether I want the same career I had before.”
And hear somebody else say:
“Me too.”
That matters.
The goal should not be to recreate the old version of someone
We often talk about returning as though success means getting somebody back to exactly where they were before.
But perhaps that is the wrong goal.
People change during career breaks.
Their priorities may be different.
Their confidence may be different.
Their boundaries may be different.
Their ambition may still be there, but it may look different.
A good returnship does not try to squeeze somebody back into an old identity.
It helps them work out what the next version looks like.
At MOCO, we talk a lot about that.
Returning does not have to mean going backwards.
Sometimes it means moving forward differently.
And that is why this matters beyond Godrej
What Godrej is doing with Gateway is interesting not simply because one large company has launched another DEI initiative.
It is interesting because it reflects a bigger shift.
A growing recognition that talented people should not be permanently penalised because life interrupted their CV.
That careers can pause and restart.
That confidence deserves support.
That return-to-work programmes should be designed, not improvised.
And that coaching can play an important role in helping people re-enter working life successfully.
Perhaps the most useful idea underneath all of this is a simple one:
A career break is not the end of a career.
It is a transition.
And transitions work better when organisations support them deliberately.
Godrej appears to understand that.
More employers probably should.