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iQuestions Faculty, Ron Price 
 
 
Question: 
 
I'm a mother of two children who I rarely see. I'm considering job 
sharing. What are the pros and cons? 
 
Answer: 
 
Job-sharing is becoming more and more popular, especially with 
employers who recognize that their people live complicated lives. Now 
that we oftentimes have mothers in the workplace as well as fathers in 
the workplace, we live in a different environment today.  
 
One of the great pros for work-sharing is that there’s such a shortage 
in labor these days that employers are a lot more willing to talk about 
it than they’ve been in the past.  
 
Oftentimes work-sharing can work out to be better not only for you, 
but for the employer as well. Our experience has been that when you 
have two people sharing a job, they bring a little bit more diversity 
and a little bit more creativity to it. They do a better job of 
understanding what the dynamics and the problems are, and they 
work together to solve those problems. They support each other great 
as a team. 
 
Another one of the pros of job-sharing is that both parties usually end 
up coming to work with more energy, more dynamic, because they’re 
not burning the candle at both ends.  
 
But that’s not to say that everything about job-sharing is good. Some 
of the cons about job-sharing: sometimes it’s more difficult to be 
promoted because your employer is thinking that you’re dividing your 
 
time, and they have difficulty sometimes understanding who’s 
contributing what. So they’ll be more reticent to promote.  
 
Sometimes they feel that you’re not as much of a career person, and 
so as a result they’re going to be a little more apt to choose the person 
who’s working a full schedule compared to somebody who’s job-
sharing.  
 
The way that you overcome that is focus on defining and documenting 
and showing your employer the results that you’re creating. It doesn’t 
have to be in a competitive way, you can show how both the benefits 
of individual effort and team effort working together creates a greater 
whole for the employer.  
 
If your employer sees these skills at work in you, if they see your 
ability to get things done, then they’re going to give you the 
opportunity to take on greater and greater responsibilities, regardless 
of the pros or cons that you’re dealing with concerning job-sharing. 
Price -2- 
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