Nevermind The Gap
And now for my unpopular opinion of the day ...
Employment gaps don't matter. They aren't your business, employers. Nobody owes you explanations about what they did with their time when they weren't employed by you.
It's their time, after all, their natural human right, their sole and sovereign possession, and their most valuable one, since it is literally priceless and irreplaceable. Maybe they took time off to attend to family matters. Maybe they took time off to attend to their own psychological and emotional well-being after a frustrating, demoralizing job. Or maybe they just had trouble getting work right away, and the longer they didn't have it, the more trouble they had getting it due to prospective employers' irrational and irrelevant judgments about them for having an employment gap. Maybe the just goofed off for awhile. It's not your business, unless they choose to discuss it with you.
Skills don't meaningfully degrade because someone takes time off. Anything done professionally for a non-trivial time will tend to move into the realm of automaticity. Like riding a bike, it will come back quickly and automatically when relevant and practiced again. There's neuroscience behind this. Behaviors that become automatic move out of the pre-frontal cortex and become encoded in rear- and mid-brain areas, such as the cerebellum, which specializes in automating complex tasks. Without this natural magic, simple acts like walking or picking up an object would forever remain tasks that require concentration, and are cognitively taxing.
And it's not the responsibility of people not employed by you to guess what skills you'll be looking for next, and spend their own (again literally priceless and irreplaceable) time and resources on speculatively training for what you might need, and might hire them for if you bother to give them a chance without already having professional experience in it.
Employers should be deeply grateful for anyone who agrees to allow them to buy their time in an employment agreement, since they can never buy a single second of it back regardless of the size of their paychecks. Employers should also recognize that they have no ownership or right to say a thing about what employees do with the time they haven't agreed to forfeit to employment.
#nevermindthegap
#investinpeople