'Gap' in resume/filled-with-odd jobs has potential to always come up in any interview whether now or in the future. Also, I'm curious on the probability of said 'Rule-of-Thumb' impacting your re-entry to academia in your context/country. I have seen people profiles who have switched back and forth between industry-academia, or even hold dual positions in some rare cases.

@NebUzer "I have seen people people profiles who have switched back and forth between industry-academia, or even hold dual positions in some rare cases" So have I, but they seem to be rather exceptional scenarios. I certainly would not know how to pull that off.

Taking a "gap year" is only useful if you had a reasonable expectation that the outcome of your job applications would be different next year than this year. How are you going to make sure that that is the case?

If you feel (in retrospect) it is not relevant for the application, not mentioning (or developing) the "gap job" in your resume is still an option…

Please clarify if your field of mathematics is pure or applied. Also if you are single or have (even prospectively) marital responsibilities.

@Trunk Good point! I'm in pure math (even though I had interviews with TCS jobs) and I have a spouse, who has very particular regional preference.

@Confused Okay - important info that. I can't add anything much to Buffy's steer to you so. The teaching practice will jog you up a bit but should eventually be beneficial when you apply for positions at major universities. Naturally you have to consider Madame's preferred region particularly.

@Trunk Thank you. Interestingly, my spouse cannot be in the US, where there are teaching jobs, which is inconvenient (and she thinks that I am not street smart enough to survive the cutthroat American life...)

@Confused You have confused me now. Are you a USA national ? If so, your wife - legally - can reside and work there too. If you are not a USA national, then state your country/region (e.g. EU) and people in that region may be able to advise you. If your wife is a USA national (which is betokened by her evaluation of your survivability there ...) then you need to apply for a US work permit as her spouse. You have to make your own evaluation of whether you can in fact survive post-Colombian America . . . Don't worry about being a Russian. There's lots of Russian math professors in USA.

@Trunk Sorry for the confusion. She's a US citizen but has some financial reason not to be present in her homeland. I myself believe that I will be fine in the US (except that I had my driver's license expire...)

@Confused You both must get Madame's situation looked into by the relevant professionals: ye both can remain fugitives indefinitely from the world's #1 academic opportunity market. In the meantime if you are in the EU you have to look for some teaching job, maybe in some smaller college. Scan New Scientist and timeshighereducation.com assiduously plus the equivalents in France, Germany, Holland, etc.

As an example, Einstein worked in the Swiss post office from 1902 to 1909. So returning to academia from a non-academic job is not an unheard-of feat.

If you are willing to "work odd jobs" for a year, obvious options might be to fast-track an MS in a related discipline. Probably you can apply to "data-whatever" programs, come in with 75% of the coursework, jump right into a research program with a prof, and be supported on a TA. Afterward, you will have increased your research output (in an interdisciplinary fashion, which looks good on resume), you will have gotten paid, and you will now have an MS in a field that will pay double in industry what "pure math" would (if you still need to go that route)

@BobJarvis-СлаваУкраїні 100+ year old examples are not relevant.

Which country are you applying in ? Not all countries (in the EU) have application cycles.

@BobJarvis-СлаваУкраїні: The state of academia 120 years ago is completely irrelevant to the current market, and mathematics is in a very different state now than one in which someone could come up with a groundbreaking idea from scratch in isolation.

@Bob Jarvis I believe Einstein actually worked in the technically more challenging job of inspector at the Swiss Patent Office. But folks, all this question is academic: OP has a wife and, however self-supporting she may be, he must get some paying work for himself. The disapproval of a working wife towards an idle husband is far greater than that of a future Head of Dept on seeing his working outside academia . . .

The idea that some universities look down on someone who "filled time" in real industry explains a lot.