Most people think of traveling as strictly for vacation, or business, but certainly not an opportunity to do long term travel while also building a career. It makes sense. We learned from an early age that visiting Italy or France was a “once in a lifetime” event. We learned that travel is a rare occasion that should be idealized and worshipped.
In 2017 though, the world has changed. People’s ideas are starting to catch up with technology.
Building a career while traveling is easier than it sounds. Certainly it depends on what career we’re discussing, but overall the World Wide Web is making it easier to stay connected, build a reputation and establish ones self as an authority on any subject.
Here are my general suggestions for growing your career while traveling:
- Start a blog
- Write guest-post articles for other blomgs.
- Create a portfolio of your work
- Be active on social media
- Work remotely on projects occasionally.
- Send an email occasionally to professionals in your field.
- Take pictures of yourself being active in your career to remind others.
- Build your own business around your field of interest.
Careers are really about knowledge and professional relationships. If you can maintain those two things while you travel, then you’ll be golden. If you have licensing exams and certifications to complete, you’ll need to either do those things remotely or travel home to complete them. However, outside of that, you can maintain and build your career while traveling.
Long-term travel will present challenges in some lines of work. When I was traveling through Panama last year, I met this great guy named Tony that was a construction worker from Montreal. As you can imagine, doing construction work remotely isn’t really possible unless you’re an architect or project manager of sorts.
However, Tony made his own system. He started a construction company with a good friend. Each year, he works for 6 months and then travels for 6 months, while his friend does the inverse. Since they own the company they control their time, can work at their own pace and and travel as they please. As they both do work over time, both of their careers flourish simply because they created a system that works to compliment their lifestyle and their desires.
The beauty of this whole thing we call life is that you can create the life you want. There are only limitations that you place on yourself.
