Part-time career: combining ambition and fewer hours in HR

For many parents in the Netherlands, part-time work is the norm. But careers are often still designed around full-time work: if you are there, you count. For HR professionals, the job itself is also becoming more demanding. How do you build a part-time career without giving up your ambition? Part-time work is not a lack of ambition, but a different distribution of time. The question is whether organisations design their careers accordingly.

The large part-time job is becoming the norm

More and more people work 28 to 35 hours, including fathers. Among mothers with a partner, that share rose from 27.4% to 31.4%, among fathers from 11.5% to 13.3% (2021 to 2025). And many people actually want to work less: 17.1% of working men and 13.9% of working women. If you keep careers open only to full-timers, you exclude not only parents, but also a large share of the people who still work full-time today.

Where hours and ambition clash

According to the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP), hours worked and overtime are strongly linked to progression into management positions, and even more strongly to progression to the top. Part-timers are promoted less often, and that difference accumulates. Four mechanisms keep careers designed around full-time work:

• The presence norm: if you are there, you count.
• Overtime as proof of commitment and ambition.
• Management as a full-time role. 29.1% of managers in the Netherlands are women.
• Bad timing: promotion opportunities and young children often coincide.

Why HR is under extra pressure

HR absorbs the tensions of the whole organisation: absenteeism, conflicts, reorganisations. Combining that with a family means carrying a double load.

On top of that comes the cobbler’s paradox: HR makes the policy for balance and flexibility, but by no means always uses it itself.

Four design principles for your own career

You do not have to wait for the organisation to arrange it:

1. Manage by results, not hours. Agree on three results per quarter and briefly share progress every month. If you are present less, you need to be more visible in what gets achieved.
2. Design your rhythm and your boundaries. Fixed working days, presence on management team days and a clear rule on availability on days off.
3. Shape your role. With job crafting you adjust your own tasks, so your hours go to the work with the most value. This is the best-supported principle (Rudolph et al., 2017).
4. Think in seasons. A career has phases of building, maintaining and accelerating. Every six months, look at which season fits.

Team agreements and what the organisation arranges

A part-time HR career only works if the team around it is organised: cover for urgent matters every day, a fixed handover, consciously sharing heavy work and meetings on days when everyone works. And the organisation turns four dials: promoting on impact instead of visibility, part-time management as standard, careers in phases, and board members who make their own boundaries visible. Also read how a continuous conversation cycle helps you manage by results.

The conversation with your manager

Prepare the conversation with six topics: your ambition in two years’ time, your ideal week, the results you want to be assessed on, availability on days off, visibility in important decisions and an evaluation after three months. For each topic, ask a question back, so it becomes a conversation instead of a request. And if the answer is no? Propose a three-month trial period. If it is about your hours, the Dutch Flexible Working Act offers a formal route.

Get started

With Deepler Research you measure per team how employees experience workload, flexibility and career prospects. With Deepler 360 you see whether managers manage by results and give room. What HR arranges for itself will soon be a blueprint for the whole organisation.

Sources

• CBS (2025). Weer meer mensen met grote deeltijdbanen.
• CBS (2024). Emancipatiemonitor 2024, chapter Werken.
• SCP (2020), via NOS: deeltijdwerk houdt vrouwen weg van de top.
• Personio and Censuswide (2025). Poll among 500 HR professionals, via HRpraktijk.nl.
• Rudolph, C. et al. (2017). Job crafting: a meta-analysis. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 102, 112-138.
• Kossek, E. et al. (2011). Workplace social support and work-family conflict: a meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 64(2), 289-313.
• Rijksoverheid. Meer of minder uren werken; betaald ouderschapsverlof.