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What is a career sabbatical?
A career sabbatical is a deliberate, planned break from full-time work, taken on purpose for travel, further study, recovering from burnout, or caring for a family member, with an intended return to income-earning work already in mind. That intent to return is what separates it from resigning without a plan or being laid off, even though the day-to-day experience of no paycheck arriving can look identical from the outside. It's worth being clear-eyed that Philippine labor law doesn't actually define 'sabbatical' as its own legal category the way it defines maternity leave or retirement pay; in practice a sabbatical is either a formally negotiated unpaid leave of absence with your existing employer, covered in lesson four, or a straightforward resignation that you personally intend to treat as temporary, which is exactly why the planning in this course has to be self-imposed rather than something a law or HR policy guarantees for you.