Getting your career back on track after going through a divorce is not easy, particularly if you have been out of the workforce for some period of time. Because it's an emotional time, recent divorcees are often not in the best position to make the right decisions.

Too often, due to fear or financial exigencies, or simply because they are relying on bad advice, divorcees fail to take the right steps to get back on track and simply take the first job that they find. The labor market is very open to women returning to the workforce after time off. A recent survey by the Center for Work/Life Policy found that of women with college degrees, 74% who took time off to raise families were able to return to work when they decided to go back. The key is to know how to go about it.

Here are some common mistakes that women make regarding their careers when they are going through a divorce:

FAILURE TO GET EDUCATIONAL AND CAREER ASSISTANCE AS PART OF THE DIVORCE SETTLEMENT — For a variety of reasons, including not recognizing its importance or fear that it might affect the amount of their alimony or child support, women fail to include provisions in their divorce settlements to get their spouses to pay for education and training to improve or update their job skills. Similarly they fail to include provisions to pay for professional career coaching to make them more marketable and help them return to the work force. Both types of support are actually relatively easy to gain agreement on.