What stepping back from a full-time career actually looked like, and the three things that made it work: getting clear about what I offer, networking and finding a champion.
My husband has served for more than thirty years, from the ranks to senior command. Around that service we have built an outside-the-box life, weaving my technology career through decades of postings and moves and keeping it sustainable. The most recent posting took us overseas with NATO.
There is a thing you feel as a contractor. Short assignments can send permanent hiring managers a false signal about your value, no matter how senior the work. I have been lucky. For the most part my career has been long stints in serious roles. So before my husband leaves service, I wanted the other experience too. I wanted to actually live the military-spouse life, rather than always working around it. The plan was to step out of full-time work for three years.
It did not play out that way, and I am glad it did not. What I learnt is that a career break only becomes an opportunity if you treat it like a product problem. Get clear about exactly what you can do for people. Network as though it is the job, because for a while it is. And find a champion who will open a door you cannot open yourself.
On the UK side, meaningful work was surprisingly hard to find. There is a well-worn track for an officer’s spouse, and a lot of it begins and ends with “host a coffee morning”. When the invention ran out, it got literal: I found myself engineering MacGyver-style vertical gardens, tomatoes and butternut squash and yellow squash and pumpkins climbing wherever they could find purchase.
So I stopped waiting to be invited. My first real foothold was the international women’s club for our military community. I joined, then joined the board, and helped more than 250 women, from NATO nations, partnership countries and the National Military Representatives’ spouses, build exchanges of culture, service and friendship through events and programmes across the year. I brought my ordinary toolkit to it: value-proposition design, complex problem-solving, planning, facilitation with tools like Kahoot!, presentations and public speaking. It was the first place the penny dropped. My professional skills were an asset here, not something to pack away for three years.
Once I was clear about what I offered, the engagements followed. On the commercial side, the sharpest was a consulting stint at Bloomberg: a product coaching role within ProdX, a team of seasoned heads of product from many industries and well-known brands, as the company reimagined its flagship product around a new AI assistant. I facilitated deep problem-solving inside their product groups, challenged assumptions and helped the function sit with an uncomfortable truth. Their own product often did not feature in the customer’s actual workflow. Then I played a role in the team responsible for a custom GPT that completely reimagined their training provision, away from a stale classroom and towards one where people arrived with real problems and product gaps and left with actual product artefacts and a way forward, using the GPT in the room. It became the most-used GPT in the entire enterprise suite.
The work I am proudest of was advisory to Beyond the Wire, a community interest company serving the Armed Forces bereaved, on their Bereavement Hub, built with the Andrew Simpson Foundation. They were about to launch a rehash of another website, organised around who the person was: a child, a friend, a spouse. It did not make sense, and it was not based on need. So I went in and redid the customer journeys around what bereaved military families actually need, had input into every wireframe and journey, and helped facilitate the end-to-end flows and features. I built accessibility in from the start, and put AI at the heart of helping those families navigate three brutal things at once: their entitlements, their grief and the hard practical business of transitioning themselves and their children out of armed-forces life. Same craft as the commercial work. Immeasurably higher stakes.
That work had a precedent. My first endeavour, before any of it, was a custom GPT called Iris, built to help bereaved people scour the copious literature about their entitlements, procedures and the support available, and get back a clear, accessible answer. Iris was the skill that got me through the door at Bloomberg.
The other thing I knew, early, was that goodwill and a long CV would not be enough. I started my career as a developer. Somewhere in two decades of leading product functions, the hands-on fluency had thinned, and the technology had not waited for me. If I wanted to come back as a technical product leader rather than a senior person who used to be technical, I had to go back to the start and earn it again.
So I treated my own skills like a product with a roadmap. I took the Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate, because the security conversation is the one every CTO and board actually has, and the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate, because I wanted to query my own data again rather than ask for a dashboard. I finished my MBA at Edinburgh Napier and graduated in October 2026, with the Oxford Saïd AI Programme alongside it.
Then I started from scratch on GitHub. No legacy, no excuses. Iris was a custom GPT. At Bloomberg I iterated a custom GPT at enterprise scale. From there I deepened the craft into Claude Code and beyond: I rebuilt my tools as working code, shipped this website with an AI collaborator and the decisions on the record, trained an AI coach for the teams I train, packaged my methods as skills that other people’s agents can install, and built web products, apps and tools for my practice. The same skills have since solved real problems in my voluntary work. I made it my mission to be AI native in the only way that counts, which is to walk the talk. Everything on the Portfolio page is the receipt for that decision.
None of the volunteering amounts to much without someone willing to open a door. Mine was the Public Affairs Officer at U.S. Army Garrison Benelux, who took a chance on a volunteer with an unusual CV and gave me room to genuinely contribute.
We had also landed in a remarkable season of anniversaries: the 80th of Arnhem, the Army’s 250th and America’s 250th, the 25th of 9/11 and NATO’s own milestone still to come. It gave the work real weight. I developed the strategies and initiatives that connect and engage military and host-nation stakeholders across the Benelux, and I built the strategic frameworks, marketing and digital assets behind the commemorations. I even got to draw again. Original illustrations, polished in Adobe Creative Cloud, ran through the social media campaigns. Then I covered it all for the .mil website, the social channels and in-person events.
A garrison is a service organisation. It has users, journeys and a trust problem to solve, just in a different uniform.
User-centricity does not care whether the user is a shopper or a soldier’s spouse newly arrived in a country they cannot yet navigate.
These ran on the U.S. Army’s national site, army.mil, not just the local garrison page, and one was picked up by higher headquarters for the command-wide IMCOM News Sampler. Each carries the byline the Army gave it.
How the garrison used a data-driven approach to validate and better meet its community’s needs, and forecast a reduction of up to $39M over eight years.
A profile. What began as a temporary clerical role grew into a career of remarkable breadth, from typewriters to cybersecurity.
Read on army.mil →
Coverage of the Brussels community Town Hall, held at NATO headquarters on 18 September 2025. The practical brief for families finding their feet.
Read on army.mil →The garrison’s day-to-day community updates and event coverage, which I help plan and produce.
Visit the page →
Government stories usually run under an office, not a person. These run under my name, “By Elle Anderson, USAG Benelux Public Affairs volunteer”, so this page is simply the named, gathered home for work the Army has already credited to me.
A few of the events and campaigns I helped bring to life.
True human growth. I raised chickens, learnt to make sourdough and crackers, grew a veg patch, lost a shedload of weight and got properly healthy, and learnt to play mahjong. I also learnt how to people on a personal level, which is a very different thing from doing it professionally.
The club and the NMR Spouses’ Luncheon of Nations. One of my favourite traditions, and one I get to be part of every year. This year, 28 nations hosted tables and 270 women attended. There is something rare in women from across the NATO world coming together, once a year, in that much friendship and sisterhood. The treat this time was a professional opera singer who taught us to sing, and then sang for us. I had the honour of a seat at the Lithuanian table. What a day.
USAG Benelux Change of Command. I helped stage the reception around the ceremony: the keepsakes, the guest craft station, the favours and the flowers.
America 250. Across the anniversary season I helped shape the celebrations, from the embassy star wall to the events themselves.
The social campaign. Original illustrations I designed and finished in Adobe Creative Cloud, part of a 40-post America 250 series across the garrison’s channels.
The point of showing your worth is that you build new worth while you do it. Across these three years I finished my MBA, and I added cybersecurity and data-analytics qualifications, because if I was going to put AI at the heart of things, I wanted the technical ground firmly under my feet.
And I put down a lot of imposter syndrome I had carried for years. The evidence had quietly piled up until even I could not argue with it, and I could finally say about myself what I would happily say about anyone else with the same record: I am a brilliant technology VP. It took a career break, of all things, to let me say that plainly.
If you are a fellow Armed Forces spouse building a portfolio career, or you just like product turning up in unlikely places, come and say hello on LinkedIn.
For the practical side, role by role, read Giving Back on an Overseas Posting, and the Product Skills It Gave Me.
Elle Anderson