If you've ever considered taking time out from your busy career to travel, whether for a week or a year, you probably assumed that you would have to sacrifice your chances of improving those all important work skills that employers value. You'll be happy to know that there are many valuable things that travel can teach you that will only enhance your career. Here's a list of 7 career skills that will only get better when you travel.

We all know interviewing for a job can be stressful and a source of anxiety for potential candidates. One of the best ways to lose good talent before hiring is to tank the interview on the employer’s side – by making candidates feel nervous and unwelcome. It may be completely unintentional on your part, but you need to remember they’re also deciding whether or not they want to work for you. Here are some good ways to make sure that your candidates are at ease when they come to interview, so that you can really see what they have to offer.

College can be the absolute best years of a person’s life; full of fun, freedom and meaningful learning that helps you on the way to getting the career that you have always dreamed of. However, suddenly leaving the comfort zone of college and being thrust in to the big wide world can often be a daunting and scary time for new graduates.Though they may be equipped for certain niche careers, they also need to have learnt and know how to apply a number of important practical life skills in order to be able to fully embrace and adjust to this new, fully-adult life.

Once your interview is over, don’t think it’s completely over. There are still some more things you can do in order to make yourself more memorable to the company. Make sure that before the interview comes to an end, you know when you can expect to hear from the company again or how they would like you to follow up. Let them know one more time before leaving that you are seriously interested in the position and that you really want to make a great contribution to the company’s success. These are the things you should do after having attended your interview.

A person who has great sales and negotiation skills will find open doors in lots of companies, in any industry and country. For a Sales Professional a job interview is a real test, because this time it’s not about selling a product or a service. The product that they need to promote to a Hiring Manager is basically themselves, let’s call it “Brand Me”. How well is this salesperson able to emphasize the good points and steer clear of the others? Candidates will have to show right from the start how good their skills, experiences, personality and motivation are.

In a highly competitive corporate world you need to start thinking in a more innovative way, if you want to have an edge over your competitors. If you don’t do it, someone else will do it, it’s just a matter of time! What might be considered as ‘great’ today, might become ordinary and ‘standard’ tomorrow. If that is the case, do you always know what further steps to take in order to keep your leading position?

Hiring Managers believe that past performance is the best indicator of future success. The purpose of the behaviour-based interviewing technique is to assess candidates in an accurate, fair and thorough way. Candidates will be given the opportunity to prove their competencies by giving detailed and specific examples from past work experiences. Let’s have a closer look at the 14 benefits of using a behaviour-based interview technique. 

The fact that we are living in a candidate driven market, in which candidates have high expectations from a future employer, makes the hiring task a real challenge. There is no doubt that also candidates have to perform and fulfill many requirements in order to get the job that also many other candidates are hoping for.

Remember that the goal of a CV is to get you an interview, not the job straight away! Knowing that recruiters spend on average just 9 seconds on a CV before deciding whether you are worth being invited to an interview or not, makes the task even more challenging. First impressions do matter! Having a great strategy in place how to approach the task can save you considerable time in your job hunt. Follow these steps and you will have interviews lined up for you!

Can you actually really motivate other people? I would say “Only to a certain extent.” I do believe that it’s not difficult to get results from highly self-motivated people, because they feel passionate about what they are doing and need very little additional encouragement. They roll up their sleeves, get started and know exactly how good they are. The real art consists in being able to motivate a person who hates their job! But if you have someone like that in your team I would seriously advise you to offer that person another challenge that s/he feels more enthusiastic about (if there is any option). It is therefore crucial to hire people who are self-motivated from Day 1. Believe me, it will save you time, money and mental energy.