How to Turn Your Career Break Into Career Success
Worried taking a sabbatical will wreck your chances for future success? Let me tell you a big reminder I once got about what career success really looks like.
I scored a win at my day job marketing for an arts venue, but I didn’t feel like I had actually done anything. Luckily, I had a colleague set me straight. She told me that yes, this was my win because I had developed such a good relationship with another company that they didn’t have to think about who to offer their opportunity to — they knew they wanted to reach out to me for my talent, hard work, and trustworthiness. It reminded me that my unique talents and experience are what make me suited to my job. That’s true for the relationships I’ve built and for my travel experience.
A lot of people worry about how a career break will affect their future job prospects. Does having a gap on your resume look bad? Does taking time off work seem lazy or unreliable? What will happen if you quit your job to travel and then try to re-enter the workforce?
Quitting My Job to Travel Improved My Career
When I started my round-the-world trip in 2016, I was leaving a few part-time jobs that together made me about $25,000 a year. When I returned in 2017, I job hunted for about two months and landed a full-time job in my field with a larger salary than I had been making previously. A few years of pivoting eventually doubled my salary. Taking a career break actually improved my career prospects!
Since then, I’ve had clients slide right back into fulfilling careers in fields like social work and speech language therapy. Often, they wind up with better work-life balances and find positions that help them continue traveling.
You can take a sabbatical without wrecking your life or ending your career by following these five critical pieces of career break advice.
5 Tips for Turning a Career Break into Career Success
Update Your Resume Before You Leave
Make sure your resume includes the details of your most recent job while they are fresh in your mind. Save yourself the trouble of a tedious task while you’re traveling.
Develop Valuable Skills While You Travel
You don’t have to land a remote job to stay relevant. Freelance projects, a blog, private professional development, or even a personal passion project could help you stay sharp. Some of the skills I worked on while traveling were graphic design, writing, website management, and social media marketing. Everything I did supported my eventual pivot into marketing and communications for nonprofits.
Read more: Skills your sabbatical could teach you
Give Yourself a Safety Net for Returning Home
Unless you’ve negotiated a leave of absence with your employer, you should anticipate not landing a job right away after your sabbatical. I tried putting out feelers and submitting applications to jobs before my trip was over, but I found that people didn’t want to interview me if I wasn’t in the country. (Hopefully, remote interviews have gained some traction since the pandemic, but your mileage may vary.) It took me about two months of job hunting after my return to secure a good offer.
For your own field and industry, you might find it helpful to chat with a recruiter before you leave. Get insight from someone knowledgeable about how job hunts are going for people with your experience and goals.
Make sure you keep enough money in your savings to cover living expenses for a couple months. Or have a plan in place to stay with friends and family while you get settled back in. A landing pad is a must!
Reflect on How Your Travel Experience Impacted You
Your sabbatical itself will help you develop skills in basic things like budgeting and time management. You’ll develop your people skills and emotional intelligence by meeting tons of people around the world. To plan and execute a big trip like this, you need to be organized, diligent, and flexible. I know my travel experience made me more decisive and more adaptable. I learned how to roll with the punches in a way that my previous office experience had not taught me.
As you near the end of your sabbatical, you’ll want to spend some time thinking about how your travels have changed you and why this was a valuable experience for you to have.
Steer Into the Skid — Highlight Your Travels in Cover Letters and Interviews
When you apply to jobs after a career break, it can be tempting to focus on your more traditional past work experience and the qualifications you had before your travels. The fact is, even if you think it’s irrelevant, employers will be endlessly curious about the gap on your resume. If you try to avoid the subject, they are more likely to view it as a red flag. So steer into the skid!
Put your experience front and center in your cover letter. Be patient and willing to explain to potential employers why you took a sabbatical and what value that experience brought you. Highlight all those skills you developed and emphasize the ways your travel changed you for the better. If you are prepared, clear, and confident, you can show them that you are bringing unique talents and experience to the table and are a valuable hire.
So, What Will a Career Break Do for You?
You don’t need to be afraid of the impact your sabbatical will have on your career success. When you step away from the working world, you get to reflect and learn in a way that very few people have the chance to do. This is an opportunity to become the person you want to be! That experience is what will make you suited for the right job. By setting yourself up for career success before, during, and after your travels, you will reap the rewards for the rest of your career.
