Combining Travel with Work Experience to make your CV stand out.
Your summer or Gap year travels are a chance to do something different, and take a well earned break after your academic studies. But in the back of your mind may be the burning question - what happens when I get back? Is this a good move in these hard economic times?
Well, with well structured and thought out plans, you can combine your travels with volunteering to get some valuable work experience that can actually improve your CV and help you stand out from the crowd.
Increasingly employers are looking at graduate?s work experience as a way of differentiating between candidates for jobs. But how can you get experience when it is so difficult to get a job? Taking part in a volunteering project can give you that exposure, whilst opening the doors to the cultures and lifestyles of the countries you visit in a way that a regular traveller would never get to see.
You might choose to get involved in a project that uses the skills you studied - medical work, teaching, counselling, conservation, marketing or even IT - right through to building your skills in something you enjoyed in your spare time such as sports coaching or photography. Or you might choose to get involved with something new and completely different, which can still add value to your CV. To give you an idea, at Kaya Responsible Travel we offer opportunities such as training as Field Guide instructor in South Africa, or doing an office work placement for a charitable organisation in Ecuador.
Take the example of our Island Marine Conservation project in Thailand. On this project you are taught to scuba dive and complete a PADI certification. You then help out with marine conservation work. If you stay for longer than six weeks there is the option to help out with the teaching of new divers and also to create a marine conservation research project of your own work. This project ticks a lot of boxes across a wide range of career choices. It includes elements of teaching, scientific research, environmental conservation and working as a diver. So by doing something like this scuba diving project that may seem quite specific, you are actually really broadening the range of working experience that you have.
Taking part in a community project can also bring focus to building your soft skills, requiring good communications, decision making, problem solving with limited resources and great flexibility. Do this working as a one-person marketing department for our Incan Jewellery making cooperative in Peru, or perhaps teaching computer skills to South African township children.
These are just a few examples of the kinds of projects that you can take part in with Kaya, and with placements from two weeks to six months it can fit with any schedule. We have trained Placement Advisors on hand to discuss what kind of experience you would want to have and help tailor a project to suit you. So please get in touch or request a callback, it costs nothing and you may get to do something amazing on the other side of the world, which will improve your CV back here in the UK -so you can get the best of all worlds.
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