People quit the corporate grind to start their own companies for a lot of reasons.

Positioning themselves to re-enter the grind is not one of them.

Maybe it should be.

A Berkeley researcher, Gustavo Manso,  has found that the entrepreneurial experience of “experimenting with new ideas”adds so much value to your management abilities that even if your venture fails, you are likely to move back to a corporate job with minimal losses. In fact, he found that a stretch of self-employment can actually boost your salary if you go back to traditional employment.

That is…if you bail on a failed venture within two years.

This validates part of the premise of  The Career Lattice, in which I position self-employment as one career lane, not as a one-way ticket out of the corporate world.

The key implication for entrepreneurs is to see their experiences – wins, losses and draws – as evidence of learning new leadership and business skills. Developing short stories and anecdotes about your adventures in startup land are key to developing relationships with partners, suppliers, lenders, and customers, anyway. With potential employers added to the mix, you’ve got one more reason to cultivate a variety of narratives about how you’ve become better at what you do and how you think by being a business owner.