When Karen Steede-Terry moved to a new city to be with her new husband, she faced what so many women face: having to quit her own job and find another in her field in an area where she may have few or no friends, colleagues, or contacts.

Terry’s response was to see this upheaval not as a problem, but as a challenge. And, after eleven years of successful self-employment as a freelance instructor, author and speaker, Terry has shared her “formula for success” with women facing similar challenges in her how-to book, Full-Time Woman, Part-Time Career.

Terry has to smile when she tells how female members of her audience would often approach her after a class or speaking engagement, wanting to copy her business model. “I never even knew I had a business model!”

Still, Terry is doing precisely what so many working women, mothers or not, dream of doing: building a flexible professional career that allows her to work from home while raising a family.

Washington Post has called Terry “an expert on helping women find ways to combine work and motherhood.” Syndicated radio talk show host Laura Schlessinger has dubbed Full-Time Woman, Part-Time Career “a perfect, perfect book!” and features it in the Book Corner of the “Dr. Laura” website.

The creative approach of Full-Time Woman, Part-Time Career is key to its usefulness. Terry helps the reader to explore professional possibilities from many angles. For instance, she states, “Many find that once they have earned a professional degree, they don’t like the day-to-day work involved in the profession.” She then proposes several viable alternatives to traditional work in one’s chosen field, many involving teaching or consulting.

To illustrate the viability of these options, Full-Time Woman, Part-Time Career features six case studies (not including her own very successful foray into the world of independent consulting) of women who have used just such strategies to combine working and motherhood successfully.

Full-Time Woman, Part-Time Career is unabashedly aimed at a professional female audience. As a review puts it, “ The book is addressed directly and solely to women. The author knows exactly what kind of obstacles women encounter in starting their own business and how to work to overcome them.” Still, any male reader looking for the how-to’s of starting an independent consulting business would be hard-pressed to find a better place to learn how to become a successful, working, stay-at-home dad. According the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of stay-at-home dads increased by 68 percent from 2003 to 2005.

Karen Terry’s inspiring success story illustrates that the dream of having it all—a professional career, time at home to raise a family, and ample income—is eminently possible.

jobsmart@gleanerjm.com