Ad exec listed his divorce on LinkedIn—he says it taught him patience and anger management
Karl Dunn says he was pulling 20-hour weeks on his divorce, while “still running a multimillion-dollar piece of global business.”
Non-traditional work is finally getting the recognition it deserves in the corporate world. Today, caretakers and stay-at-home parents can list their experiences on LinkedIn. But what about divorcees?
One advertising exec says that getting divorced was like the worst job he ever had—so, like any other role, he added the stint to his LinkedIn profile.
“Make no mistake, it was an unpaid job with unreasonable hours,” Karl Dunn wrote in an personal essay for Business Insider.
Dunn was director of brand innovation at the advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi before his divorce—which, he says, was so stressful that it impacted his performance and he ended up being sacked.
“I turned my workroom into a toxic environment with daily tirades about my divorce,” he explained, while adding that he was pulling 20-hour weeks on divorce-related matters, including “never-ending paperwork” on top of his main gig.
“Like many divorcees, I was self-medicating for my anxiety, suffering from insomnia, battling the worst depression of my life, and still running a multimillion-dollar piece of global business.”
It has been five years since Dunn’s divorce and he is now a freelance executive creative director. He only brought himself to list the event as a career experience on LinkedIn two weeks ago.
“Even though my divorce was often a painful marathon, it ultimately made me so much better in my career,” he adds. “You can’t outsource your divorce, you can’t delegate it, you have to drive that bus.”
Skills gained from divorce: Endurance training, anger management, and law
Like any other job that you’d list on LinkedIn, Dunn highlighted the skills he learned in the year and a half of going through a divorce including “endurance training” and “anger management”.
Karl Dunn—LinkedIn
“I lost count of the number of desks I didn’t throw through windows. After some rocky first months, I could conduct a successful pitch and sell campaigns while keeping my internal rage outside the boardroom,” he wrote.
In a “matter of months” he said that he had picked up some basic law, as well as “how to work a 12-hour day on an average of three hours of sleep.”
“There’s no downtime when working full-time and spending 20-plus hours on your divorce,” he adds. “Divorcing people, especially divorcing parents, become masters at getting it done and getting it out.”
Listing divorce could make you stand out to employers
Although Dunn’s listed experience as a divorcee on LinkedIn is seemingly a first—LinkedIn didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for comment on how rare this is—divorce is increasingly common.
According to a report commissioned by Hearst Publications, up to 70% of a company’s workforce has gone through a divorce—or has been impacted by a close colleague experiencing one.
And in Dunn’s eyes, highlighting your experience with marital failure on the networking platform like any other career break may even up your chances of getting hired—or at the very least, increase your network.
Immediately after going public with his divorce on the app, Dunn said that fellow divorcees started messaging him.
“Anyone in your organization who’s divorced is probably now carved out of steel and more skilled and empathetic than you ever imagined,” he concludes.
“All things being equal, if I were hiring, I’d pick the divorced person every time.”
