The notion of considering travel just a hobby still prevails among many people. But what if there was a way to leverage travel into acquiring a stellar job and making it shine on a resume.
Traveling is an eye-opening experience for a person which many are afraid of pursuing. Through traveling, one can go on to gain new knowledge and change their perspective of the world.
If done correctly, traveling can work as an addendum to your list of skills. So, that is what we will cover.
Let’s begin and understand how to make traveling look good on your resume.
Include skills learned through traveling
You can add skills that you learned throughout your traveling experience. Let’s say you spend a few months traveling through Europe and familiarize yourself with the French language.
Also, when you are traveling to a foreign country, your soft skills matter a lot. For instance, your interpersonal and communication skills may define how well you get along with the local population.
The point is that through your traveling experience, you can gain a concrete understanding of what skills to put in a resume in terms of linguistic skills, leadership, communication, etc. If you refer to the online resume templates, you will see that not one of them is missing the skills sections.
Work exchange experience
Work exchange is about utilizing your skills and knowledge to get accommodation while traveling. It is also known as voluntourism.
For voluntourism, all you need to do is find someone who is looking for help and lend them a hand. In return, they will help you with accommodation, food, and other perks.
You can offer your services to NGOs, hotels, or small businesses. There are online portals such as Helpstay that you can utilize to look for a work-exchange job.
At times we like to travel just for fun and even though it has immense benefits it does little to help your professional career. But work exchange experience helps you showcase your skills that can be useful to the employer.
Take account of the career break
Sure traveling enhanced your skills and changed your outlook towards the world. But if you did not do anything constructive in terms of work experience, there will still be a gap in your professional career.
That’s why you should focus more on your skills rather than listing your work profiles in a chronological format.
You should choose a functional format where you can make a separate section “summary of skills” to describe your skills and expertise.
Make it relevant to the target profile
Your traveling experience is irrelevant if it has no significance to the job you are targeting. To make travel shine on your resume, we advise you to go through the job description and understand the job requirements.
For instance, the recruiter may be looking for someone who is bilingual or has great communication skills. You can utilize such pointers and showcase your linguistic & communication skills.
You should try connecting each statement you write in your resume to the target profile so that the recruiter can understand the relevant skills you gained through traveling.
Where to add your travel experience in a resume
If you worked while traveling then we advise you to add it to the profile experience section. This will help you showcase your traveling experience as an actual work profile. Also, if you were doing freelance work then treat it as professional experience. However, for volunteering work, create a separate section as it is not exactly counted as work experience.
Add your language skills in a separate section as well. Name it as “Languages” and add all your linguistic proficiencies there.
Further, the idea is that you need to showcase your traveling experience in a professional tone. Hence, try to sprinkle it throughout the resume wherever you can rather than creating a special travel section. Include transferable proficiencies to the skill section. Add pointers related to travel in the resume summary/objective.
Key Takeaways
Here are a few key takeaways:
- Add all the skills you learned during traveling along with your linguistic skills.
- Include volunteer experiences during your journey to hide gaps in your resume.
- Choose a functional format if you do have a break in your professional career.
- Only add the experience that is relevant to your target profile.
- Do not create a separate section to add your traveling experience.
