You’re sitting at work on a Monday afternoon. You should be making copies of a report no one will read for a boss no one likes, but instead you’re staring out the window, daydreaming about kicking the copies and the boss to the curb to go travel. But you, like so many before you (and too many after,) are afraid. Because while you could easily bid farewell to your current employer and head off into the sunset, how will you explain to a prospective employer down the line why you did it?
That question’s not as difficult to answer as you think. Here’s how to not get hired despite having taken time off work to travel, but because of it.
A travel gap on a CV tends to look more like an ominous black hole than an accomplishment. But unless you spent the entire time taking shots in Ibiza – and even if you did – there were likely some milestone moments. Use your travel achievements as a way to illustrate your ability to be organized, responsible and curious. Whether you climbed mountains, crossed borders or sampled the world’s purported spiciest Pad Thai, the preparation and execution of said feats parallel the set of responsibilities you’d have working in an office. Only they’re a lot more interesting to read about.
It stands to reason that we travel to see people, places and things unfamiliar to us. If you wanted the familiar, you’d have just stayed at home. In any workplace an appreciation for diversity and the differences in others should be highly valued. Perhaps you learned a new language on a whole other continent, or navigated the difficulties of daily life in a third world country. The experience of travel enriches our appreciation for how other people live. And how they work. If you’ve learned how to help manually flush toilets in a country where you don’t speak the language, you can work respectfully with Frank even though he organizes budgets differently than you do.
While you may not want to wax too poetic to a potential employer about those toilets you were manually flushing, you may want to highlight the time it went terribly wrong. And what you learned. There are very few certainties in a traveler’s life, but one is undoubtedly misadventure. Weather turns cold when it’s supposed to be hot. Trains don’t show up. Then there was the time you got locked in a Moroccan hammam with a monkey (hypothetically.) Travelers are inevitably confronted with the need to be flexible and roll with the punches. Regardless of the disaster, use your misadventure anecdotes to illustrate how travel has developed your ability to think on your feet and adapt to whatever’s thrown at you. Even if it’s a monkey doing the throwing.
You may never know how things would’ve turned out if you’d stayed at that job. But you can know this for certain – they hired somebody else to replace you and make copies, and that person doesn’t really like your old boss either, and his or her CV will read like the CVs of countless other people. While they were making copies, you were learning lessons – about the world, the people in it, and yourself – that can’t be learned in an office. But they can be applied in an office. And they can make one hell of a CV.
For that matter, they can make one hell of a candidate.