Last Updated on October 10, 2024 by Aswetravel
It’s important you know how to make travel look good on your CV. Many people, especially those on a competitive career path, are very hesitant about taking some time off to travel the world.
I’ve met people who say that they would love to travel the world for a year, and that they probably will – one day.
“One day, when I’ve finished studying.” “One day, when I’ve made it in my career.” “I will when the kids grow up.”
Unfortunately, that day usually never comes because there will always be something in the way.
There is no right time to travel, which is why you should do it RIGHT NOW.
We can’t live our entire lives dreaming about the future.
But what about that career?
How to Make Travel Look Good on Your CV
Won’t it look bad on my CV – having a whole year just blank? Here are some tips on how to travel and still make it look good on your resume.
Volunteer or Work
Taking a whole year off to volunteer will look very impressive on your CV, and you’ll have a great time doing it.
Besides, there are so many types of volunteer work that you might actually find something which will be directly related to the skills needed in your job.
This will show that you have an incredible passion and love for your work, care about others and aren’t afraid of hard work.
If you have training and work in health care, taking a year off for medical volunteering abroad will be both a rewarding as well as a beneficial experience for your career.
A more general but also very beneficial option is to teach English abroad.
There are both jobs where you volunteer for free as well as jobs that actually pay you a salary.
That way you can work, but still have time leftover to explore the country you’re in and enjoy the best it has to offer, be it on the weekends and afternoons.
Just Want to Travel?
If you’re not into volunteering or working abroad but just want to travel, then don’t lie about it on your CV and say you had a work experience when you didn’t.
Instead, be honest about it and put your gap year under “Other Experience”, including the dates.
This, however, doesn’t mean that your experience wasn’t important.
You learn a lot of skills from traveling, it’s just about putting it down the right way on paper.
If you learned how to bargain and haggle, you’ve learned some great “negotiation skills”.
The planning, financing and organization of your trip taught you “planning and budgeting”, and how to keep a record of your expenses.
Your unplanned situations, culture shocks, and how you dealt with them can be put down as “adaptability”, and you can write about how you cultivated great “language and communication skills” when communicating with people and overcoming language barriers.
Study Abroad
When you choose a study exchange program, you can use your travel experience in many ways that will benefit you.
You will be working on completely your university degree.
Hopefully, you will work on learning the native language there.
You should also enjoy traveling around and see as many places as you can.
Show Off the Blog
If you have a travel blog, it’s definitely something to include on your CV, and why not include the long list of skills you learned from maintaining your blog:
Website designing, php coding, networking, writing, SEO and social media skills are all very good and useful skills to include!
The Big No-No
Many companies like that their employees have taken a year off because it often means they’ve “done it” already and won’t be traveling again.
Don’t let on that you might be leaving for another big trip, even if you are.
For those of you who are doubting whether to take that year off to travel the world, I hope this article gave you a kick in the right direction, and for those who have just finished a big trip, I hope this helps with working out what to write on your CV.
5 Things We’ve Learned after our 1st Year Of Travel Blogging
What?! Was the first thing that came to my mind – how the hell did we get here?!
What we learned travellingThis year has gone past so fast – we have had As We Travel for exactly one whole year, and we’re enjoying it more and more as every week goes by.
We have definitely had our ups and downs, and despite having so many great bloggers to learn from, we still learnt SO many things the hard way.
Here are a few things we have learned during our 1st year of blogging.
Blogging Is Easy – Travel Blogging Is Not
Travel on a resumeSitting at a desk in a nice ergonomic chair with your laptop, having all day to work, food in the fridge and a home to live in, is far away from the reality of a travel blogger.
We write on our 11 inch laptops lying in awkward positions on hard beds in run-down hostels, moving every few days and trying to explore the places we visit while working on a website.
To me, the most difficult task has been to keep the focus and inspiration while trying to deal with Visa applications, transport, finding WiFi, etc.
Traveling while running a blog full-time is unlike anything we’ve done before.
It has really taken our travels to a whole different turn.
Good Things Take Time
I’ve found that many people I meet who know nothing about blogging (and don’t have a blog themselves), have many presumptions about it.
They either think it’s really easy to create a successful blog – that it’s just to start writing a few posts and you’ll make heaps of money, or they think it’s a waste of time and don’t see it as an actual job.
Either of the two, they don’t take it seriously at all.
This can easily make you doubt yourself and question what you’re really doing.
You know you would never work at a place without getting paid the first month, never write for a magazine for free everyday for months, but at the same time you’re spending as many hours as a full time job without getting paid for your blog at first.
Just try to remember that all good things take time.
Without Passion You Lose The Drive
Traveling on a resumeTo keep up a blog, you need to have a true passion for what you do, or else you can stop doing it right away.
We learned pretty quickly that blogging and traveling is exactly what we want right now in our lives.
We want to share our travels, our thoughts and our tips, and we want to do it on our own terms.
There’s something to be said about being our own bosses, no matter how much we have to work for it.
People always go on and on about how the young people today want to start their own businesses but never realize how much work it means.
I don’t care how much work it means, I want it.
And I know that if I didn’t want it so bad, I would have quit doing it a long time ago…
Even The Smallest Things Make A Big Difference
social media marketing and travelingWe like to play around a little and test different things on our site.
Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But if we’re curious, we’ll give it a try.
What we have noticed, though, is that some of those tweeks sometimes make a big difference.
Put a plugin here or there, and you can either lose subscribers or gain subscribers.
You Can’t Do This On Your Own
Blogging is a social business.
Bloggers interact and share with each other.
A blog with good content and design would be nothing without readers and other bloggers sharing your site with others.
Social network means everything for a website, being able to connect in different ways with people.
As much as you would like to, you can’t only rely on yourself, but you also need the social network to help you out.
We feel so blessed to be able to do this as our full-time jobs, sharing our content with you as we travel around the world.
We’re hoping that a picture, a few lines will provoke and inspire you to also go out there and live this life the way YOU want.
We thank you from the bottom of our hearts, since we know none of this would be what it is without you reading these words, and sharing what we do with others around the world.
SO THANK YOU SO MUCH!! 🙂
5 Things We’ve Learned After Our 2nd Year of Travel Blogging
It almost feels like a lifetime has passed since we started AsWeTravel.com exactly two years ago today – so much has happened in our lives since then.
Last year we posted a blog about some of the things we learned from our first year of blogging, in the hopes that you might learn something from our experiences as well.
This second year has been different in so many ways and we have learnt as much about travel blogging as we have about ourselves and the kind of life we want to lead.
Here are some of the main things we’ve learned from our second year of travel blogging.
Limit Your Daily Time Online
During our first year of blogging we became obsessed with having internet access everywhere and being connected online all day every day.
During our second year we realized that the blog doesn’t ALWAYS need ”round the clock care”, it can take care of itself for most of the day – and, more importantly – many things you think you need to do can wait.
We realized that we were spending many more hours online than we actually needed – the work we had to do could have taken only a few hours, but we were messing around, working ineffectively which would result in us spending 6-8 hours instead.
By giving ourselves a deadline, or a time limit, we worked much more effectively, and gave ourselves more free time to explore the places we visited.
Decide how many hours you really need to spend online every day, and then only spend that time working.
Learn How To Separate Travel & Travel Blogging
Separate Travel & Travel BloggingWhen you travel full-time like we have for the last 2 years, it is very important to learn how to separate work and travel, then draw a clear line between the two.
Rather than sitting in a café or bar tweeting on your iPhone (for your blog) – sit back, relax and look around you – learn to enjoy the moments just as a traveler, not always as a travel blogger.
By always being connected with your iPhone, updating Twitter telling everyone where you are etc – you risk not actually enjoying the places you visit.
As a travel blogger, it is easy to lose yourself in work, and by always “looking for the story” you might actually miss it.
We noticed that when we disconnected and simply went out as travelers – the right story for the right city came to us by itself.
Ask & You Shall Receive
Successful Travel & Travel BloggingThis year we’ve realized that if you want something – sponsored trips, free hotel stays, travel products to test etc – all you really need to do is ask.
After getting sponsored stays in over 30 hotels and hostels in the last year, and getting plenty of other sponsored attractions, passes and activities with tourism boards – we’ve realized that the worst that could happen is to simply get a ‘no’, and that shouldn’t put you off but instead push you to grow your site & connections even more.
The same goes for other things as well – if you tell yourself that you will reach a certain goal (monthly traffic, twitter followers, earnings etc) eventually you will find a way to achieve it – if you just trust and are passionate enough to work hard for it.
We’ve really learned how to appreciate the power of positive goal setting and mental focus on what we want, rather than giving any focus to negative events which may show up.
Pace Yourself & Don’t Try To Do Everything
Pictures for travel bloggingIn the last year, we completely overwhelmed ourselves and tried to do too many things rather than taking one thing at a time – one example was the Europe Train Challenge.
During the train challenge we traveled to 33 countries in 75 days, spent 2 days in each place, filmed a video episode from each city & wrote 2 articles about each city – phew!
That really was an amazing experience, and it forced us to really focus and work hard, but looking back we have learnt that it is better to focus on fewer things and do them as well as you can, than trying to do too many things at once.
By trying to film, take photos, stand in front of the camera, write articles and at the same time capture and experience every place we visited – traveling became pretty stressful, especially with a time limit.
We learned to focus on one thing at a time and pace ourselves so that we wouldn’t get overwhelmed – remember that you can always go back next year again. 😉
What Others Think of Your Blog is None of Your Business
You will meet a lot of people who don’t understand why or what you’re doing when travel blogging, and some will even disapprove, but just because people don’t agree with what you do, that doesn’t mean they’re right.
Never do anything you don’t want to do, and never give up on something you believe in just because others don’t.
When I heard Wayne Dyer say, “What you think of me is none of my business,” I could really relate this to travel blogging. Learn to meet jealousy, doubt, ignorance and confusion with a smile.
Our second year of blogging has been full of many great successes and a few big mistakes, but that’s what life is for – to live, to learn, and to see every mistake as a learning curve which helps you grow as a person.
We still have a lot left to learn, and I’m really looking forward to see what lessons this year (2012) will bring.
3 Years of Travel Blogging – It’s About Learning & Growing
It feels like these past 3 years have gone by so quickly and yet we’ve experienced and learned so much since we started blogging – when we began this journey 3 years ago we never realized how much it would end up changing our lives and the decisions we made.
Who knew a blog could be life changing in such a way?
Today we want to take a moment to look back at our year and the things we’ve learned about ourselves, blogging and business, and what we’re most grateful for …
Learning Skills for Any Industry
Sometimes there is just no shortcut.
You have to do things the hard way by learning from your mistakes – this year, we’ve done that more than ever before with the 3 new non-travel related websites and 2 iPhone apps we are working on.
But while we learned so many new things, we also realized just how much the knowledge and skills you get from travel blogging can be used in other industries online.
Next to the good old “make-money-blogging-bloggers” – travel bloggers are among the most internet-tech-savvy of bloggers, and it’s a great industry to learn new things which you can implement in other projects.
Techniques we take for granted or are overused in travel blogging can be used to really push and promote your company websites to another level elsewhere.
Our YouTube Fans are Awesome!
Among the things we’re most grateful for this year with As We Travel are our YouTube followers.
If you are not following us on there yet, make sure you join us: www.youtube.com/AsWeTravel.
After we released 50 travel videos in 2011 and 2012, it was a big anti-climax when nobody seemed interested in them on our blog – not many comments, not much appreciation – nothing … we thought the hard work of making these videos had been a massive waste of time. But it turns out that good things sometimes take time.
Learning about how to do successful social media marketing was the key for us.
Today, we have over half a million views on YouTube, and 50,000 monthly viewers watching our videos.
We love the crazy comments and wild discussions that our videos provoke, from laws about filming publicly, to how you’re really supposed to drink Turkish coffee.
We have had TV channels from America, Canada, China, and Czech Republic reaching out to us wanting to use our video content on their official TV channels.
And it’s really fun to see that people appreciate the effort we have put into them.
Every Path in Life Has Sacrifices.
No matter what you do in life, there will always be sacrifices – there will be as many sacrifices if you choose to quit your 9 to 5 job as there will be if you choose to stay.
This isn’t something many people care to talk about – we live with this illusion that getting away from everything will cure every problem we have, when in fact leaving will often bring up even more problems than if you were to stay at home if you don’t understand the real cause.
During the last 3 years we have been tested over and over again if this life choice to travel and work the way we do really was the right decision to make – the amount of times we nearly decided to give it all up for a “morally-correct” job can’t be counted on our fingers.
The realization that you will have to sacrifice things with any choice you make in life really helped us stay on track and continue to build what we have done.
It all comes down to what means more to you, and what you’re willing to let go of.
We chose an uncertain life over a safe path, and we have to deal with the consequences of that, but in the end it has all been worth it.
