Combatting Imposter Syndrome: The Returners

Stephanie Williams, a Client Manager at AtkinsRéalis, writes about imposter syndrome specifically as it affects people returning to tech careers after time away. The scale of the problem is bigger than most people assume: Hays research puts imposter syndrome at 70% among women and 58% among men across careers generally, and it isn't confined to junior staff, with 71% of 20-somethings and 70% of 30-somethings reporting it.

The returner-specific angle is the real story. Somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 women leave the UK tech and digital sector every year, a churn Williams estimates costs the UK economy £2 to £3.5 billion once you count lost skills, lost experience, and the cost of recruiting and training replacements. A career break, for whatever reason, becomes the trigger that turns ordinary self-doubt into a genuine barrier to coming back at all.

Williams writes from personal experience, having returned to work twice after having three children, the second return only becoming possible once hybrid working expanded what "returning" could actually look like. That's a practical detail worth noting for any employer designing a returner programme: flexibility isn't a nice-to-have, it's frequently the difference between someone returning and someone not trying.

Her practical advice for individuals is concrete rather than motivational: keep a running "self-belief" file of actual achievements to refer back to, benchmark yourself only against your own past performance rather than colleagues who never left, treat asking for help as normal rather than a confession of weakness, and take an honest, unemotional inventory of what skills have genuinely gone rusty versus what's still there.

For organisations, she points to four levers: self-esteem and confidence-building workshops, mentoring schemes where mentors are open about their own doubts rather than presenting as flawless, recognition systems that leaders actually participate in rather than delegate, and visible female role models in senior roles, since believing something is possible usually starts with seeing someone else do it first.