How Travel Enhances Your Resume

Photo source: Flicker - Moyan Brenn

Travel doesn't just enhance your life; it can also boost your chances of getting a job. Spending time on the road equips you with skills in a way sitting in a classroom can't, and can make you more attractive in the eyes of a potential employer. Continue reading to learn how travel can help boost your resume by teaching you important life and professional lessons.

1. How To Budget

Whether you wrote it down or it's just in your mind, when traveling you're sticking to a budget. Maybe you're traveling Peru on $20 a day, dining at local restaurants, sleeping in hostels and opting for self-guided activities, or maybe you're visiting a more expensive destination like Tokyo or London and giving yourself extra room to splurge. Either way, you have a set amount of money you can't go over, and you figure out how to allot your cash to stay within that amount while still having a worthwhile travel experience. If your potential boss is looking for someone who can complete projects and plan events efficiently and cost-effectively, you're a prime candidate.

2. How To Plan On A Large Scale

Planning a trip - especially abroad demonstrates that you can organize events even when some of the details aren't 100% clear. You may have never have been to Europe, but you managed to travel by train to four different countries without issue. Or maybe taxis in Brazil were more expensive than you thought, so you re-vamped your itinerary to make time for public transportation. Essentially, you're the type of person who makes things happen no matter what the obstacles are.

3. Communication Skills

Especially when traveling to a destination where the language is different from your own, you're enhancing your language skills. Even if you didn't become fluent in Spanish when you visited Argentina or Arabic when in Jordan, you still got around by communicating. Maybe you hired a guide (problem solving), maybe you carried an electronic translator or maybe you made use of gestures and drawing pictures to interact - you still helped yourself become a better communicator.

4. How To Problem Solve

It's inevitable when traveling that you'll run into problems, whether they be small issues like a food order coming out wrong, getting ripped off by a cab driver or something larger like a stolen passport or bad stomach flu. The point is, you handled the inevitable issues that arose on the road and found a solution to get back on track.

5. The Art Of Negotiation

Every time you barter at a market, haggle with a taxi driver or negotiate for a tour discount you're honing your negotiation skills. Being an effective negotiator is crucial in business, and your boss will appreciate your ability to be persuasive.

6. To Be Adaptable

It's rare in a career to never encounter changes; employees come and go, new policies are implemented, project guidelines shift, managers change. Your potential employer wants to know you're adaptable and won't whine about change, but will instead learn to work with it.

7. To Be More Worldly

The more you travel the more you see, and the worldlier and well rounded you become. This is attractive to employers, as it makes you likely to be able to think outside the box. Right now the world is experiencing an explosion of innovative ideas as we learn novel ways of doing things and make use of alternative resources. The more creative ideas an employee has and the more people they can relate to, the more of an asset they become to the company.

Have you added travel experiences to your own resume?

Note: Available plans and coverages may have changed since this blog was published.