How can I market a travel sabbatical on my resume?

Corporate America would have you believe that the only way you can grow is behind a desk. I disagree. When my husband and I took a year off to travel around the world, we grew in so many ways we didn’t expect. We satisfied all the cliches – yes, we became “better people” for sure – but we also grew in ways that we knew our future employers would care about.

Life is good away from the desk too.

Taking time off allowed space for more creativity, and we both took advantage. We had impressive projects to show as a result of this. My husband designed a beautiful, super functional app inspired by our safari travels, and I wrote two books and fully outlined a third.

The trip also offered us time to invest in learning skills we didn’t have time to learn at home. For my husband, for example, this meant learning to code in new languages. We also both learned two new languages in immersion settings – learning Spanish in Buenos Aires and Italian in Rome.

We developed other skills too, just from our day-to-day experiences. You will likely have a list of new skills (or better developed skills) simply from persevering through long-term travel. Here are a few examples of skills we picked up:

• Negotiation – I went from being a terrible negotiator to a fantastic one. Haggling on the streets of Morocco (in French!) taught me to negotiate unabashedly and to find easy ways to compromise.

• Leadership – In Africa, we traveled with a large group and typically had to tackle chores together. I hadn’t done group projects with people I didn’t know well since high school, and boy was it a lesson in effective leadership. Cooking in the bush in Africa is hard. It got a lot easier when I practiced leadership skills when it was my turn to be head chef – delegating, avoiding my reflex to micro-manage, and building camaraderie for the moments when we had to slog through something difficult.

• Discipline – Before we left on our trip, I would not have described myself as disciplined. Ironically, with way more free time on my hands, I became a lot more disciplined. In Africa, we usually had to wake up at 4AM, pack up all our belongings, and hit the road. Traveling around the world in general, we regularly had to persevere through rough travel days. And – managing our own job searches with no income coming in in a tough economy from some random part of the world, I had to be on it.

Some people will assume you are traveling around the world to “find yourself” or to drink and party for a long time. Maybe those are even true. But, there is so much you can do during long-term travel in order to grow in ways relevant to the next company that hires you.

As you do grow, be sure to let people know! Plan accordingly and share what you’ve learned on places like LinkedIn or with colleagues and mentors directly. And, prepare your interview answers accordingly!

“Tell me about a time when you had to navigate a difficult situation” sounds like a great lead-up to a story about when elephants broke into our camp in Zambia.

“Tell me about a time when you had to assess risk” sounds like a great lead-up to a story about hiking in the wild winds of Patagonia.

Certainly recruiters will mostly want to hear about your past work experience and not your trip, but you can still pepper in stories from your trip to make it clear you’ve been growing even though you haven’t been stuck behind a desk.