Zuzana Vyhnánková: Balancing family and work is not just a woman’s job

We bring you the second part of an interview with career consultant Zuzana Vyhnánková. In this part, we focused on women’s topics, such as returning to work after parental leave or flexible working hours.

If you are interested in knowing when it’s time for a career or industry change, how to take care of your mental health, or how the Czech attitude toward career counseling has evolved, be sure to read the first part of the interview.

A large part of your clients in career counseling are women. What topics do they most often deal with? Is returning to work after parental leave one of them?

The most common issue is new career direction. I don’t know if that’s due to how my personal brand is set up or if it’s simply the most frequent problem. But men deal with it too. When I look at the issues that both men and women come to me with, I actually see more similarities than differences. Yes, some women do address returning to work after parental leave, but it does not make up the majority of my cases.

However, for both groups, self-confidence often comes up.

I think boosting self-confidence is a very female-oriented topic. For example, the “Holky z marketingu” (Girls in Marketing) organization also focuses on it in their courses.

I think that’s perhaps a bit of a cliché. In practice, I discuss this topic with men as well. Many of them struggle with conflict avoidance and prefer not to engage in conflicts. But conflict is crucial—for negotiating boundaries, performance evaluations, and more. That, too, is part of self-confidence.

So, while self-confidence may manifest differently in men than in women, we all deal with it. Our upbringing hasn’t exactly prepared us well in this regard.

That said, neither women nor men discuss it much with me. I’m not sure why—perhaps they feel it’s beyond the scope of career counseling. That’s not to say I’ve never touched on the topic with anyone, but I wouldn’t say it’s a frequent issue that takes up a significant portion of our time. The most common discussion revolves around identifying one’s strengths and figuring out in which industry, at which employer, or under what work arrangement these strengths could be best utilized.

So, if you don’t often discuss returning to work after parental leave with women, what about balancing family and career? After all, in the Czech Republic, family care is still primarily a woman’s responsibility.

The only way to balance family and career is for the responsibility not to fall on just one person in the family, but on everyone. If everyone wants a career, everyone must also share family duties.

Parental leave financially drains women and slows down their careers immensely. It’s a huge mistake to assume that when a child starts preschool at age three, a woman can suddenly return to full-time work, start contributing to the household right away, and pick up where she left off. Not at all. It will take another three years for her to financially recover, and that will only happen if her partner supports her.

In reality, she often won’t be able to work full-time. For example, preschool operating hours do not match standard full-time work hours. When you add up holidays, sick days, extracurricular activities, and other responsibilities, one parent can realistically work only part-time. That’s just the reality. The fact that we all somehow patch things together by working late into the night is another story—but it shouldn’t be the norm.

A woman needs support even after parental leave. Usually, she is only supported while she is on leave, but she actually needs several more years of support to get back on her feet because she has typically depleted her financial reserves and savings over those three years.

It’s also unrealistic to think that just because someone babysits her child for a while, she can immediately work full-time, just like her partner. No—he must first take on part of the caregiving responsibilities so that the woman can even start considering how, when, and for how much she will work. That support—that shared responsibility—must come before she even re-enters the workforce.

And I think people don’t often think about it this way. The discussion usually centers around state financial support, which only lasts while the woman is at home. Then suddenly, from one day to the next, she is expected to transition from the kitchen to the office, and everything is magically fine again. But it’s not. For many months, sometimes even years, it’s not.

How should the state or employers help in this regard?

The state could help simply by restructuring school holidays or adjusting how preschools operate. The fact that preschools close for holidays is a complete nightmare for working parents and an outright mockery of the system. Who gets two months off in the summer, plus Christmas, plus all the other public and seasonal holidays throughout the year?

I really liked the honest frustration of a participant in one of my marketing webinars. We were discussing returning from parental leave, job searching, and what types of work arrangements employers are willing to offer. She said:

“I have a child. And with a child, you have to go to activities, pick them up from school or daycare—every woman deals with this. Every woman, or almost every woman, will have a child at some point in her life, and most of them want a career or at least some kind of job. So why isn’t the system designed to accommodate this massive segment of the population? Why isn’t this the standard? Why do we have to constantly negotiate for it?”

Well, because men are in politics. 😊 At least, that’s how Šárka Homfray explains many similar “absurd” customs in society in her book Why Are We So Angry?

We’ve talked about women in general. What problems do women in marketing face?

Marketing is unique because it is a multi-disciplinary field. There is no single “marketing”—it’s an industry that encompasses a vast number of different roles, covering completely different disciplines that require entirely different skill sets, experiences, and competencies. So, that is probably the biggest challenge in marketing.

And compared to other industries, it seems that a career can be built relatively quickly in marketing. At least, that’s my repeated indirect experience.

Marketing is also highly digital and evolves extremely fast, which requires continuous learning. In marketing, you can’t just graduate from university like a doctor and be done. I don’t mean to say that doctors don’t continue their education, but I see marketing as constant learning.

From my experience, it is a very dynamic industry.

Absolutely. And if I had to answer the second part of the question—what are the most common challenges marketers face?—I’d say loss of meaning and, in some cases, burnout or a high risk of burnout.

That’s another thing that makes marketing unique—after a certain period or at a certain age, people start feeling like it no longer makes sense to them. Or they struggle with imposter syndrome. Because marketing offers so many career paths, it can have a paralyzing effect. People often don’t know which direction to take, and even when they choose a path, they feel out of place and question their own knowledge.

What about performance pressure? Is that also a common issue in marketing, or am I mistaken?

You’re not mistaken.

Some companies pressure employees to spend a lot of time at work at the expense of their personal lives, so they develop strong personal ties within the company. That’s why they particularly value young people who move to Prague without any support network—the agency becomes their new family. But not everyone likes that, and as you mature a bit, it can logically start to bother you because by then, you’ve built a life elsewhere.

So, there are a lot of specific challenges. Another common problem I come across is landing the first job. Job postings always require experience, but how can you have experience if you haven’t worked yet?

And then there’s transitioning into another field. Finding that first stepping stone in marketing—figuring out how to break into the industry. I really enjoy helping clients discover those small bridges that connect their past experience with marketing.

Do you want to know:

• How to balance mental health and career?
• To what extent should you push your boundaries, and when is it time to realize that you’re forcing yourself into a job that isn’t right for you?
• Whether it’s a good idea to discuss mental health issues with your employer?

Read the first part of our interview with Zuzana Vyhnánková.