Surrender to Your Wanderlust to Boost Your Career

By Susan Finh –

Jodi Ettenberg quit her job as a well-paid lawyer in 2008 to travel the world permanently and document her journey through food at Legal Nomads. The Internet is rife with similar stories of executives, cubicle dwellers and families with small children leaving it all behind to hit the road.

But there are actually ways travel can help improve your career instead of escape it. Transform your professional life into an exciting adventure by taking some time off to travel and hone your skills and talents. Here are five ways traveling can actually help your career:

Learn new skills

Traveling has a way of pushing you out of your comfort zone and introducing you to new skills and hobbies you never would have tackled at home. Make the most of your time on the road and look for ways to tap into your interest while improving upon career skills. Have a product idea for baby boomers looking to reinvent themselves? Try something adventurous like taking a surfing class designed for baby boomers to gather market research and bond with your demographic while riding the waves. Need to take a career advancement course? Take a public seminar in another city on anything from public finance to corporate cash flow to network with a new group and forge connections.

Stand out from the crowd

The current job market is competitive, with dozens, if not hundreds, of people vying for the same position. Travel can help bring more personality and context to your resume and give your interview a boost. Bring your stories of professional growth, networking and adventure to your interview for a more engaged and fascinating conversation. While other candidates draw from canned responses about their biggest weaknesses, you can reference a story about managing your stress on the road when you got stranded for 48 hours without accommodations.

Manage your stress

Despite what anyone’s photos on Instgram say, lying beachside in Brazil or hiking Machu Picchu isn’t a picture-perfect vacation behind the scenes. Regardless of where you go, travel can be stressful and it challenges us to rise to the occasion and get control over a situation. Whether you’re stranded in a foreign country without a passport or you find yourself in need of a doctor in a country where you don’t speak the language, stress is a normal part of travel. As you manage to deal with stress, you’ll develop a competency towards handling problems both big and small that will come in handy back at the office.

Redefine teamwork

Traveling with a group from work can deeply enrich team-building skills and a sense of collaboration. As you learn more about your team, your relationships improve and trust for one another dramatically increases. You’ll also learn about each other’s skills and talents and apply that toward generating new ideas and managing projects.

Hone decision making

You can’t hide behind a colleague or your boss when it’s time to make decisions on the road. There’s no one else to pass off the big decisions to but you. It’s true you may just be deciding on whether to visit exotic city A or B or where to dine, but you’re still responsible for your decisions and choices. And as you spend more time traveling, you’ll be faced with harder choices, such as how to manage your money and where to go next to maximize your time off.

Susan Finch is a freelance writer with a passion for travel and helping small businesses find their online voice through content marketing, blogging and beyond. She is an eclectic writer with more than 10 years of experience contributing to guidebooks, magazines, iPhone apps, online publications and more. Susan can be found at BySusanFinch.com.