Turning International Experience into Career Gold
11 January 2012
Your international experience is over. Your backpack is returned to its dusty home under your bed, your suntan is starting to fade, and your Skype credit is decimated by calls to all your new overseas friends. So what now? International internship, study abroad and volunteer experiences don't come cheap, and at some point you have to count the costs and try to measure the return on investment (ROI).
There is at least one straightforward way to do this. What career objective are you currently focused on? A permanent job after graduation? Your next career-related internship? Or maybe a place on that Masters program you applied for? If your international experience helps you achieve this objective, you can safely tick that ROI box. We've outlined some straightforward steps to help you make that happen!
Step 1: Go!
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Go abroad and learn like crazy! Expose yourself to new cultures, get fluent in a foreign language and challenge yourself to live and work or study like a local not a tourist. Discover reserves within yourself of resilience, independence and assertiveness that you didn’t know you had.
The second part is trickier. Once you’ve returned, you must be able to articulate the value of this internship in a concise and compelling way - on your resume and cover letter, in interviews or as part of grad school applications. But how?
Step 2: Do your homework!
Start with reflecting on your experience and particularly its relevance to your chosen career. There’s no reason not to have well-prepared answers to the following questions:
- What kind of city is [your destination city]?
- What did you do there?
- What did you learn?
And if you’re struggling to articulate all that you’ve learned, try asking yourself some of the following questions:
- What was the biggest challenge you faced during your time overseas and how did you overcome it?
- What differences were you able to observe in work culture, business practices, education systems or management styles, compared to your home country?
- What will you do differently in future as a result of your experience?
- What transferable skills have you developed that are valuable to a potential employer in your chosen field? (Examples might include: communication skills, flexibility, independence, global awareness, initiative, curiosity, appreciation of diversity, assertiveness, etc.)
Step 3: Write it Down!
Next you must figure out where on your resume to include information on your international experience. Our advice? Put it where it will have most impact, as long as your resume remains consistent and clearly laid out. For cover letters, take the opportunity to elaborate a little on the most relevant elements of your international experience. And in interviews – bring them alive with anecdotes and examples! Speaking of interviews…
Step 4: Showtime!
Interviews offer ample opportunity to mine career gold from your experience! Direct questions about your time overseas are fantastic but there are often plenty of other ways to point to the value of this experience. For example the following questions allow you to highlight valuable lessons learned abroad:
- Tell me about the achievement that you are most proud of.
- Can you describe a significant challenge you recently faced and overcame?
- Have you ever had to make a decision based on incomplete information?
It’s reasonable to expect your internship, volunteer or study abroad program to provide an accelerated learning experience, in terms of personal and professional development. But, if you’ve followed the above steps, it should also provide you with the means to take that next step on your chosen career path, and in so doing deliver real return on investment.
Connect-123 provides one-on-one career advice and coaching to all program participants, which continues even after their participation in the program. This includes assistance with reflection on key learning points, resume preparation and mock interview questions. Some programs also offer comprehensive workshops on communicating the value of your international experience.
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Career Development
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Eimear Costigan
Program Director, South Africa
Understanding why people seek new and meaningful experiences overseas is easy for Eimear. While completing her languages degree at university in Dublin, she spent summers working in France, Spain and the UK, and studied at the University of Bordeaux for a year. Her previous role as an international Marketing Manager for a US multi-national took her to North America and all over Europe, while her itchy feet took her to Central America and Japan in her spare time. Eimear gets a real kick out of matching the right person to the right opportunity – and loves seeing interns fall under Cape Town’s spell, just as she has done.
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