For many recent graduates or school-leavers, the desire to travel has them contemplating a gap-year which they inevitably resigned to taking the place of making that first leap into the working world, but travelling can actually boost your employment prospects as opposed to hindering them. Some people dismiss travelling as a waste of time and money. However, the skills you pick up when travelling may take you from those budget overnight greyhound buses around Asia to a life as a corporate jet setter and frequent Jettly customer in the future. Broaden your horizons, it might just be the making of you! Whether you plan to work for yourself via a business or company you start or indeed if you want to come back from your travels and search for a job, going about your hostel-hopping exploits and the organisation of everything in between can all be used to bolster your employment prospects and make you attractive in the eyes of potential employers.
Special Skills Every Traveller Develops
The specific formal qualifications required for a specific job are a given and prospective employers usually then have a lot of candidates to choose from in that regard. What sets potential candidates apart from the rest then becomes the work experience each applicant has – work experience which will undoubtedly be very scarce to non-existent if you’re all fresh out of college. Ordinarily your peers who go straight into the work space through conventional means like apprenticeships, internships and the likes acquire more work experience than someone who decides to travel instead of going straight into the corporate world, so you have to make every second count if you’re the latter.
Every traveller develops a specific set of mainly organisational skills, so that’s what you’ll have to make count in your favour and this is the sort of experience for which there is no substitute. You can and should highlight this experience in your CV, bringing to light the skills you developed in planning, adaptability, taking initiative, teamwork, interpersonal skills, independence and communication and language skills.
If that still leaves you feeling like you could do more to acquire some sellable skills an employee would delight in while you’re travelling, there’s always the option of actually working while you’re travelling. There are plenty of options as well.
Jobs to do While Travelling
Volunteering is a great way through which many travellers choose to make the most out of their travels and gain some solid, practical, on-the-job work experience as part of a range of different causes.
Teaching is another avenue to pursue, whether you’re teaching English in a foreign country or indeed if you want to enjoy a different flavour of teaching like working as an activities instructor (skiing, kite-surfing, tour-guide, etc).
Some jobs which you can do while travelling require a bit more initiative on your part and might even require you to get the ball rolling in the beginning without getting remunerated directly. A travel writer for example first needs to rack up some travel and writing experience, so you’d perhaps create a travel blog before anybody would consider hiring you as a travel writer. There are many other jobs which one can do remotely in addition to writing and travel writing, such as graphic design, photography, editing, remote admin work, etc., otherwise dream travellers’ jobs like being roped in to be the caretaker of an exotic island also make for some of those opportunities which you’d perhaps have to carve out yourself as opposed to being advertised.
