How do you know that you may be ready for a career break? Pamela Skillings, a successful entrepreneur, certified career coach, and the author of Escape from Corporate America: A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams, describes the signs that it may be your time.

1. What gets people down about working in Corporate America?
Most of us have similar gripes about bad corporate jobs—including long hours, unfair treatment, political B.S., bureaucracy, and lack of flexibility. If you feel burned out because of heavy workloads and unrelenting demands, if you’re sick of feeling like a cog in a machine and yearn to do work that is more meaningful, you’re not alone.

In today’s economic environment, corporate employees are more stressed out than ever before. Many have been overburdened with the work of their laid-off colleagues and are living in fear of the next round of cutbacks.

In other cases, people are simply in the wrong jobs—their careers kind of just happened to them like mine did for so long. And then there are those who basically like their corporate jobs, but feel like something is missing. They have some dream that they have been denying because they’re afraid it’s not realistic or they don’t know where to start.

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[singlepic=1219,250,,,right]Congratulations for taking the first step in planning a career break or sabbatical – recognizing that you possibly want to take one! It’s not an easy decision to make, especially if you are surrounded by people who question your choice. But we are here to let you know you’re not alone.

So what brought you to this point? Feel stuck in your career? Need a new direction but not sure where to go? Not being challenged? All of the above?

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