Who Is Jessica Mills?
Jessica Mills is the Founder of JEM Coaching and a certified professional life coach who supports parents returning to work after parental leave. With nearly a decade of experience in the high-pressure world of market data and a background in economics, she brings both analytical rigor and deep empathy to her work. Drawing on her own lived experience of navigating ambition, identity, and confidence after becoming a parent, Jessica helps individuals and organizations create calmer, clearer, and more sustainable return-to-work transitions—empowering working parents not just to manage, but to thrive.
When Returning to Work Becomes a Turning Point
For many professionals, returning to work after parental leave is framed as a logistical challenge—calendars, childcare, handovers. For Jessica Mills, it became something far deeper: a confrontation with identity, ambition, and self-trust. After nearly a decade thriving in the fast-paced world of market data, Jessica found herself navigating two very different return-to-work experiences after the births of her children, each one reshaping how she understood confidence, success, and support at work.
Those moments didn’t just change her career direction; they clarified her purpose. Today, as the Founder of JEM Coaching, Jessica is helping parents move beyond survival mode and into careers that feel grounded, sustainable, and genuinely fulfilling.
The Making of a People-Centered Leader
Jessica’s professional foundation was built on analytical rigor and high performance. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Royal Holloway, University of London, graduating with 2:1 Honours. Her academic training sharpened her ability to think critically, assess complex systems, and understand the structural forces that shape outcomes—skills that would later underpin her coaching practice.
Her early career unfolded in demanding market data and analytics environments, including roles at CJC, Starcom, and TRG Screen. Over nearly eight years at TRG Screen, Jessica progressed from Analyst to Senior Manager within Managed Services, operating in high-pressure settings where accuracy, pace, and accountability were non-negotiable.
Yet even as she advanced professionally, Jessica was also shaped by a strong ethic of service and community. From volunteering through her university years to her continued personal commitment to charitable causes, including running the London Marathon for Sands, Jessica has consistently gravitated toward roles centered on encouragement, support, and human connection.
Ambition, Identity, and the Reality of Returning
Before becoming a parent, Jessica assumed her path would be linear: build a career first, then later step into a “job” that fit around family life. Reality challenged that assumption.
After her first child, she felt more ambitious than ever—eager to keep progressing while grappling with conflicting emotions around identity and motherhood. The internal tension between professional drive and maternal guilt became impossible to ignore.
Her second return to work proved even more defining. While on maternity leave, Jessica actively pursued and secured a promotion, a reflection of both her capability and ambition. But upon returning, she was met with crippling imposter syndrome. Despite strong feedback and proven results, she struggled to believe she belonged in the role, ultimately stepping down from the position.
Importantly, this did not happen in an unsupportive environment. Jessica worked within an organization that cared, but lacked specific structures to support the emotional and psychological transition of returning parents. That realization became pivotal.
“Going through this myself, in a supportive workplace, made me realize I cannot be the only one,” she reflects. “And what about those who don’t have a supportive workplace?”
That question changed everything.
Building Confidence, Calm, and Clarity Through JEM Coaching
Driven by lived experience, Jessica retrained as a professional life coach, earning a Diploma of Education from The Coaching Academy, an Association for Coaching–approved program, and becoming DISC certified. In 2025, she founded JEM Coaching, a practice dedicated to supporting parents as they return to work after parental leave.
Her work centers on three core pillars: confidence, calm, and clarity.
Confidence, as Jessica defines it, is not performance-based bravado, but deep inner trust.
“Once you have inner confidence, the trust in your own instincts, intelligence, and decision-making, the rest follows,” she often tells clients, drawing directly from her own battle with imposter syndrome.
Calm is about intentional slowing down in a culture addicted to urgency. By creating space for pause, rest, and reflection, Jessica helps clients move out of panic-driven decision-making. She has seen firsthand how rushed energy ripples outward, affecting not only parents, but their children as well.
Clarity anchors everything. Jessica encourages parents to define success on their own terms, recognizing that goals evolve with seasons of life. For her, success has shifted from titles to feelings, groundedness, alignment, and presence.
Through one-to-one coaching, group programs, leadership workshops, and organizational partnerships, Jessica works at both the individual and systemic level, helping parents and employers create return-to-work experiences rooted in compassion and realism.
One client story, in particular, captures the impact of her approach.
A working mother, referred to as “Sarah”, joined Jessica’s Empowered Transitions program three months into her return to work, exhausted and questioning whether she could continue full time. Through coaching, Sarah redesigned her days, learned to decompartmentalize responsibilities, and developed a simple yet powerful practice of asking where her energy mattered most in each moment. By the end of the program, she no longer felt trapped in survival mode. She felt capable, confident, and grounded, choosing to remain full time not out of pressure, but belief.
This is what’s possible when returning parents get the right support: not just coping, but thriving.
More Human Workplaces by Design
As she continues to grow JEM Coaching alongside consulting work, Jessica remains deeply committed to practicing what she teaches. She embraces a multifaceted identity—coach, consultant, mother, and structures her days with intention, reflection, and celebration of small wins.
Her vision is clear: workplaces that recognize returning from parental leave as a profound transition, not a footnote. Cultures where parents are supported not only with policies, but with empathy, clarity, and trust. Environments where ambition and caregiving are not in conflict—but in conversation.
Jessica Mills is not redefining the return to work through theory alone. She is doing it through lived experience, thoughtful leadership, and a belief that when parents are supported to feel confident, calm, and clear, everyone benefits.
Editorial Note
Jessica Mills’ journey reminds us that sustainable careers are built not just on performance, but on understanding the human transitions behind it. As organizations rethink how they support working parents—and as individuals navigate their own return-to-work journeys—her work offers a compelling blueprint for what more human workplaces can look like.
The question is no longer whether parents can return to work—but how we choose to support them when they do.
