The US Bank’s ‘Encore’ programme won the global award category at this week’s Opportunity Now Awards for innovative schemes that encourage diversity.

Aimed at managerial-level staff who’ve typically occupied director-level front or middle-office investment banking careers before ‘off-ramping’ to spend time with their families, Encore has already helped 25 people globally back into banking, nine of them in Europe.

Over half of the Encore ‘returners’ work flexibly, and (unsurprisingly) most are women, although the scheme is open to men as well. Returners are assigned a mentor or buddy to help ease the transition.

So can you hop back into a senior banking role after masterminding the metamorphosis from toddler to teenager? Maybe, but this isn’t exactly typical. “The amount of time people have spent out of the market varies,” says Ann Marie Salamy, a member of Lehman Brothers’ London diversity and inclusion team. “Some have been out for a year, some are out for three to four years – a lot of people with young children have spent two years out.”

Erin Leonard, a VP in Lehman’s asset management division, got a job with the bank via Encore last year, after taking 24 months off when she had her son.

“I spent six months interviewing for different roles with varying degrees of success. It was a disheartening experience because most of the jobs were uninteresting or required a significant step back on the career ladder,” she says. “The Encore programme came along at just the right time – I could have found a job without it, but I’m not convinced I would have immediately been able to regain a career.”

People entering the bank through Encore need not have worked at Lehman in their pre-parental incarnation – Salamy says the bank’s keen on receiving applications from anyone who’s spent time out of the industry.

Interested applicants are advised to visit the bank’s website for information: www.lehman.com/careers/lifeatlehman/life_balance.htm, or to email their CVs to encoreeurope@lehman.com.