How International Travel Can Help You Land Your Future Dream Job

The reasons people love to travel are pretty much endless. But apart from the cultural and educational benefits of travel for students, there is another, purely concrete benefit: travel can really help you in your future job search. According to loads of recruiters, traveling abroad can really provide a kick-start to building your resume and give you a leg up as you seek out your future dream job. Here are a few reasons why!

1. Language

One of the biggest jump-starts your resume gets when you’ve done some international travel is in the area of language. In an increasingly internationalized world, more and more businesses and organizations absolutely require people who are fluent and comfortable communicating in more than one language, and immersive international travel is hands-down the best way to learn one. To be able to walk in the door for an interview with a potential employer and have the ability to communicate in multiple languages will put you head and shoulders above 90 percent of the competition.

2. Cultural Competency

And even if your travel focus has you going to countries where English is primarily spoken, don’t worry. There’s more to work than just words; employers are on the lookout for employees with “cultural competency” as well. This can be defined as the ability to empathize with, understand, and adapt to a variety of work environments and work cultures. Spending time immersed in another country gives you a great education in the kind of nimble adaptability employers look for.

3. Communication Skills

Tied in with both of the above points is the incredible boost to communication skills that international travel gives you. When you’re forced outside of your safe, familiar bubble of home and school, you must of necessity learn how to communicate better. Not only in a different language or at least a different style, cadence, rhythm and even word choice in spoken language than you’re accustomed to, but also learning the different cultural expectations embedded within that unfamiliar tongue. Even if they all speak English, people who live and work in Scotland don’t communicate with each other the same way people do in San Francisco. But if you have experience communicating in both realms, you instantly have a better understanding that adjustments have to be made cross-culturally, and a better ability to do so.

4. Confidence!

We’re sometimes told that a job interview is a sales pitch, with you as the product. If there’s anything we’ve learned about sales from watching good old Don Draper on “Mad Men,” it’s that confidence is the secret sauce needed to sell anything. And while it’s hard to quantify the confidence that international travel gives you if you haven’t experienced it yourself, let’s just say that if you’ve managed to navigate the metro system of Shanghai, or climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, or swim alongside great white sharks on the Great Barrier Reef – not to mention meeting tons of people along the way – you’re coming into that job interview with more confidence, and thus a better chance of getting hired than if you hadn’t done those things.

So get out there and get started on the international travel path to a better job – along the way, you might just find a better you as well!

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