[nickburns]

  I'm talking about the part of the connection outgoing from the VPN

your understanding is correct—that the 'segment' between VPN server and final destination/employer's public-facing infrastucture is no longer traversing a VPN tunnel and therefore could not be fingerprinted as VPN traffic.

if using a public VPN service provider, it would be identified, however (quite easily and at very low technical cost mind you), based on source address, as public VPN service provider netblocks are well-documented.

see, for example: https://github.com/X4BNet/lists_vpn (first search engine result for me querying "vpn ip list")