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I graduated from university in July 2013, and have been working as a software engineer since December 2013. My first role was a 6 month contract that ended up being extended by a couple of months. My current position is a permanent role, but since joining this company (about 15 months ago), I have been contracted to one of their clients in the Defence industry (UK).

For a number of years, I have been very keen to do some 'proper' travelling, i.e. travelling for several months all in one go, rather than the odd trip to another country for a week while on annual leave.

I thought that it was probably best to get some professional experience after finishing uni, rather than go travelling then, so that in theory it should be easier to get a job in the future.

It now looks like my employer's contract with the client that I'm working for at the moment will probably be coming to an end fairly soon, and so I'm thinking that now might be a good opportunity to go and do some travelling for a year or so.

What I'm wondering is, how much would doing this be likely to affect my prospects of getting a job when I finish travelling? All of the careers people I spoke to while I was in education told me that having too large a gap of 'unemployment' can hinder you from getting jobs later down the line... is this actually the case?

If not, why not? If so, maybe it's just a case of weighing up how much I want to travel vs the 'security' of having stable employment?

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Software engineer / test automation engineer here!

Every year since 2007, I've changed jobs, and travelled inbetween. Moved countries too.

The question does come up every few interviews - most don't even mention them, but eventually:

"What about this gap here?". "What were you doing?"

My response: "Oh I went off travelling for a few weeks/months"

The response, without fail, is simply "oh, where did you go?" and we launch into a travel conversation for a couple of minutes. People are generally more interested than critical, in my experience.

Sometimes I've had "and how did you keep your skills up?" etc (valid question in software) and I go on to talk about personal projects, online reading, coursera etc, and it's yet to be a problem.

It might vary on country, city, type of job, but I've also switched domains several times (finance, aviation, games, real estate, job search) and just made sure to make interviews about my skills and interest in the roles at hand.

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  • That's a really helpful answer- thanks! Not to question your integrity (I just know myself too well!)... but did you actually do many personal projects/ online reading/ courses, etc while you were travelling? It's just that I can't see myself doing that to be honest... I am someone who is very much a 'work to live' person, rather than 'live to work'. I went into computing because I enjoy problem solving/ logic/ reasoning rather than because I have any real passion for technology... which appeared to be a very different approach to most people on my university course!
    – Noble-Surfer
    Oct 8, 2015 at 14:40
  • Out of interest, what was the longest time you spent travelling when you went, and how long generally were you looking for work after you got back?
    – Noble-Surfer
    Oct 8, 2015 at 14:59
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    Don't lie in an interview: if you didn't do those things, don't claim that you did. And one of two things is true: Either your breaks will be short enough that you won't get out of date. Or they'll be long enough that you need to do some of those to keep yourself employable, and you can just say what they were in the interview.
    – stannius
    Oct 8, 2015 at 18:35
  • @someone2088 longest was 8 months. longest it's taken me to get a job was as the recession hit / end of 2007, plus I wasn't good at job hunting. Now it generally takes me 2-4 weeks to secure and start a role.
    – Anony
    Oct 8, 2015 at 21:08
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    like @stannius says, just tell the truth. Sometimes I've done coursera courses as they're really interesting, other times all I can say is "I keep up to date by reading tech sites like stackoverflow/slashdot/hacker news". Depends on the trip. There are certain websites I look at most days, so I can quote a couple of those - just the fact I was doing something (no matter how small) - they seem to be ok with it.
    – Anony
    Oct 8, 2015 at 21:10

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