Traveling may seem inconvenient to your company and managers. Time spent traveling means time away from your desk and job.
However, traveling is one of how people connect with the world. The mountains, the beaches, and the colorful cities around the world, it’s all an experience to die for.
People travel for various reasons, including visiting family and spending time with friends. Some people enjoy traveling as a means of chasing the sun, ultimately avoiding winter.
Traveling can help people develop themselves. Many travelers have taken to the road in an attempt to find themselves, find love, or educate themselves about other cultures.
Whether you want to find yourself, or just need to fulfill your wanderlust, here are 5 ways in which travel can actually boost your career:
1. Take A Break
According to many studies over the most recent decade, Americans are the least likely nation to take a vacation. Many citizens either don’t get vacation days or are requested not to take the days owed to them.
Many Americans believe that taking their vacation days and spending time away from the office will be detrimental to their promotional prospects.
Often, American workplaces are filled with overworked and exhausted employees. When employees are overworked and exhausted, they lack motivation and tend to be unproductive.
Taking a vacation can help restore motivation and productivity. Taking two to three eight-day holidays a year can be all you need to replenish your energy and avoid burnout.
When taking a vacation, it is important to unplug. Often, people on vacation feel obliged to respond to work-related calls, texts, and emails. However, this detracts from the purpose of the vacation in that you are not actually taking a break.
Rather, if you are on vacation, you have every right to ignore work-related communications. Unless there is some kind of emergency, you should not feel obliged to work while you have time off.
If you are a student traveler who has taken a break before taking on a job, you can go for resume help or assignment help for your thesis or dissertation writing work.
A writing service ensures that our studies are not compromised while you are on vacation. There’s nothing better than completing your college properly before entering the corporate world, or for that matter, any job that you take up.
2. Opportunity For Networking
When you are traveling, you have opportunities to meet new people. While you may not have it in the forefront of your mind to make friends with people in your field, the opportunities arise when you least expect them.
Networking is important no matter the context or where you are, as meeting the right people could help you progress your career or change to a preferred field.
Listening to people can take you a long way in life. However, it is important to remember to add valid input in the conversation so that you don’t look awkward.
Using this technique means not needing to actively approach people. People will come to you and randomly share their thoughts with you.
Through this system, you can begin to make friends and potential contacts to better your career prospects.
In the past, if you were talking to someone from a different country, chances of them making an effort to contact you would be very low as it would be slow or expensive.
However, the internet has made networking much easier. You can add people on your social media, text and call them via chat apps, or simply send them an email.
3. Understand Others
When a person spends most of their time in one place, they become accustomed to the norms and prejudices of those local people.
Thus, someone who has never experienced another culture might have a hard time understanding why people from a different place do things differently. This cultural ignorance can be detrimental to workplace relations.
Many people who have not researched a nation’s culture or traveled to that nation may have deeply rooted misconceptions about the people who live there.
When these uninformed travelers reach that destination, they are confronted with culture shock that has them scrambling for apologies when they make social faux pas.
A recent case of tourists behaving badly has resulted in Amsterdam banning guided tours of the red light district, while also considering banning tourists from being able to purchase cannabis.
This decision comes off the back of people disrespecting the purpose of the red light district while participating in drug tourism.
If your business aims to interact with businesses in other countries, it is important to understand their culture to avoid insulting them.
Even if you disagree with their beliefs and customs, it is always good to show respect to win them over in business dealings.
4. Learn New Things
The modern business world is fast becoming global. While most businesses trade within their country’s borders, more and more businesses are realizing the value of the global market.
As a result, many companies expand trade to other countries – even countries where English is not a common language.
One of the biggest global trade participants is Japan, and while many Japanese people may be able to form basic English sentences, many Japanese locals speak no English.
When you travel to a non-English speaking country, you may feel the need to arm yourself with a few survival phrases in the local language to help get you by.
However, the longer you stay in a foreign place, the more you pick up on the local languages and customs.
Exposure to the language won’t only offer opportunities to learn the language; it might spark within you a desire to pursue the language in an academic context.
When you have a multitude of language qualifications behind you, you become invaluable to companies looking to expand globally.
Even in countries where English is an official language, having an employee or translator who can speak the main local language can be useful in forging strong business relations.
5. Improve Self-Confidence
Traveling to a foreign place forces you out of your comfort zone. You need to learn different ways of communicating with locals while also adapting to new surroundings and new customs.
Even the most introverted people gain confidence through travel. While you may be able to hide behind a phone translating app, there are times when you will have to just go up to someone and ask.
Improved self-confidence bleeds into other aspects of your life. When you have self-confidence, you believe in yourself and your abilities.
In addition, since you are thrown into unfamiliar situations, you need to learn to sink or swim. This helps you develop stress management techniques that can be applied to your daily life.
When you are traveling, you need to make decisions for yourself. These decisions test what you know about yourself and your abilities. Once you have made a decision, it is important to see it through even if you feel like changing your mind later on.
Pushing your boundaries can help you realize how strong you are as a person, and help you develop your personality in a way that brings you inner peace and joy.
Conclusion
Traveling to improve career prospects may appear counter-productive. However, the value that travel adds to people’s lives can help them improve their job offerings.
Furthermore, while you are traveling, you can pick up new skills or explore different career options that may present you with new opportunities.
However, even if you are not looking to change your job or career, it is important to take frequent vacations or re-energize and restore your motivation and productivity.
Author Bio:
Michael Gorman is a renowned freelance writer and proofreader from the UK who currently works at paper writing service, top resume writing services and top essay writing service. His interest in everyday developments and current trends makes him a knowledgeable writer who has a great fan-following for his blogs and articles. Feel free to contact him via Facebook or Twitter.
