Graduate jobs and travelling should I stay or should I go

As the years have moved on, travelling the world became a different entity, an experience that would mature the young and wild into more rounded characters suitable for employment. Today, well the jury is possibly out. Ironically, the numbers choosing to travel appear to be rising, a stark contradiction to the level of debt most are in at the point of graduation. Indeed it’s possibly the case that graduates now leave with so much debt, a few extra thousand to travel doesn’t seem to make any difference!

Having interviewed many, many graduates in recent years and then attempted to pass them on to employers for their vacancies, I would suggest that the key factor now is that, if you have travelled, what have you actually done while travelling and what are you able to say you have learned.

Let’s return to some core principles of graduate recruitment. A trained interviewer will know that people’s behaviour tends to be consistent both over time, and from one context to another. As a result, their job is to analyse the way in which you have behaved in the past, to predict how you will behave in the future. To be more specific, behaviours, for example the way in which you plan your activities, the way you make decisions, the way you deal with problems whilst travelling will be an excellent indicator as to how you will deal with the same whilst at work.

Another core principle is to look for ‘transferable skills and experience’. What this means is that even if the person hasn’t done the exact same thing before, can I find examples of the key component parts of the role from other scenario. The same applies to the key behavioural traits that are desired for the role.

So how can we use knowledge of this for when you decide to travel, or indeed to decide if to travel. Well firstly, I don’t think the act of travelling will in anyway damage your chances of gaining top graduate jobs. The days of any negative perceptions in this respect are gone. My suggestion is that you invest some thought into using your travels to build up your database of examples of traits, skills and behaviours to later use at graduate job interviews. It may seem a little bit boring, but try keeping a note book or diary to record you experiences. If nothing else it would be an interesting read in 20 years time! In itself it could create dramatic impact at interview to produce a well travelled diary and explain you kept it to ensure you learned as much as possible from the experience. This would certainly catch my interest demonstrating a selection of highly desirable traits. I would also doubt any of your competitors will be doing the same.

Here a re few examples of generic interview questions and how you could use your travelling experience for positive effect.

Give an example of how you plan activities or events

- What the interviewer here is looking for is the thought process you go through to plan events and tasks. Is it logical, methodical. Does your plan of action include contingencies in case things go wrong. So how did you plan your trip, where did you go, when and why. Perhaps you organised the different countries to ensure that periodically you passed through somewhere you could gain work easily if you needed more money, whilst intermittently visiting more remote places where no work was available. There are no right and wrong answers, just demonstrate with examples your rational thought process.

Give and example of a crisis you have encountered, how did you deal with it -

Perhaps you had a wallet or passport stolen…did you panic, or come up with a rational plan to rectify the situation and calmly implement your plan.

Give an example of where you showed initiative to solve a problem -

Your money ran out and you needed more to move on to your next destination. You proactively approached local people to find casual work and a farmer gives you a weeks work on his farm. You earn the money you need and move on.

In many cases, what graduates seeking work lack is simply ‘experience’, life’s personal database of events and the cause and effect of different scenarios, with which you can begin to predict other future scenarios to improve your decision making.

Travelling can accelerate the building of your personal database of life’s experiences, seeing more people, places, cultures, events than many see in a life time. If your serious about gaining top graduate jobs, make this experience count and keep notes to use to your advantage in an interview situation.

Good luck.