I took a six-month career break to travel the world from September 2024 to March 2025. I visited 11 countries over four continents. I saw unbelievable landscapes and cities I’d always dreamed of. I had the time of my life.
But why did I feel so guilty about it beforehand? Why did it take me so long to muster the courage to tell my workplace I wanted to travel long-term? Taking a career break to travel seems straightforward in hindsight but I grappled with a multitude of career-based obstacles first.
I don’t hate my job
I’ll start by saying that the reason for my career break wasn’t because I hate my job. I’ve seen countless examples online of people quitting a corporate job they hate so that they can travel the world indefinitely. That’s great for them but it wasn’t quite the position I was in.
My job is interesting and challenging. I’ve worked really hard to get to the position I’m in now and it’s taken a long time to get to this point in my career. There are parts of my job that I dislike, but isn’t that true of every job? (I had been thinking of a career change though – more on this below.)
My career break was not motivated by hating my job. It was motivated purely by a desire to travel long-term. But I was essentially balancing that desire to travel against the security and stability of a career I’d worked hard for.
Workplace obstacles
When I was thinking of taking a career break to travel, I encountered numerous career-related obstacles. Many of these were thrown my way by my workplace but others were created in my own mind. Here’s my thought process on each.
No sabbatical policy
My first workplace obstacle was that my workplace doesn’t have a sabbatical policy. This meant that I was going to have no option but to quit my job if I wanted to travel for more than two weeks of annual leave at a time.
Quitting did feel extreme. It’s always a hassle to find a new job, having to do applications and go through the nerve-racking interview process. But if it was going to be the only way I could travel long-term, I was prepared to do it. (It worked out that I didn’t have to quit in the end – more on this below.)
“You’ll ruin your career”
On a more personal level, my superiors gave me the impression that I was ruining my career by taking time off to travel. First, the gap in my CV would be a problem. Secondly, people would think I wasn’t committed to the profession if I was happy to abandon it for months at a time or put a significant pause on climbing the corporate ladder. They said those things would harm my career prospects.
I had to decide if these things mattered to me, and even whether they were true. On the one hand, I didn’t particularly care what other people thought of my life choices but, when everyone is discouraging you from taking a career break to travel, you do start to believe them and it feels reckless to ignore their advice.
And did I even want to continue in the same career anyway? (More on this below.)
“Now’s not a good time”
Taking a career break might not be convenient for your team at work. But if not now, when? There’s never going to be a situation where you can plan sufficiently far in advance around workloads and other people’s commitments. Also, if you plan around other people’s commitments all the time, then you’ll never prioritise what you want. This did feel selfish to me. But I knew I would regret it if I decided to abandon my travel plans because I was prioritising everybody else.
There’ll never be a perfect time for a career break to travel or do anything else. If you want to do it, you have to upset a few apple carts in the process. But I promise your colleagues will be able to cope without you.
Career choices more generally
By the time I raised the idea of quitting my job to travel, I had been thinking for at least a few months about quitting my profession entirely. As I’ve said above, I do enjoy my job in general, but I’d had about a year where lots of things were contributing to me not enjoying it so much. I found it hard and stressful. I felt like I had put in so much effort but none of it was paying off because all my hard work was doing was increasing people’s expectations of me to an impossible level. I kept thinking that there was more to life than this. I didn’t (and still don’t) think I could face this level of stress for the next 30 years of my working life.
I wasn’t truly ready to leave the profession and I didn’t have any solid plans for what I might do next. But if I was going to have to quit my job to travel anyway, wasn’t this the time to quit the profession entirely?
The problem was that I have the best job I’m going to get in my industry. The work is not only interesting but cutting-edge. My firm doesn’t demand ridiculous working hours. The job pays well. Importantly, I like the people I work with. Was it wise to throw that away?
Letting your team down
Even though I have the friendliest team at work, I still grappled with feelings of guilt for letting them down. I would have to hand over my workload to my colleagues when I left, when they were already busy. My unselfish side didn’t think this was fair, but my selfish side wanted nothing more than to go travelling, leaving my colleagues picking up my work.
Feeling like it’s not worthwhile to take a career break to travel
Finally, I felt like travelling wasn’t a very worthy reason for a career break. The only times anybody has any significant time off work in my profession are having a baby, studying or long-term illness. Hardly anybody I know in my profession has taken a career break to do something fun like travel. I felt worried that it would be seen as frivolous in comparison to all the other difficult things that people do take breaks for.
Combating workplace obstacles to a career break
As you’ll gather from what I’ve written so far, I tussled with myself for months over taking a career break to travel. My desire to travel was constant but my feelings of guilt and my career stability were pulling me back.
In all of this, there were some thoughts that kept coming back to me – and which some of my colleagues (at the more junior end like me) expressed to me – that helped me decide to go for it. Here they are:
Six months isn’t a long time
Six months, or even a year, isn’t a long time in the grand scheme of things. People go on parental leave for a year all the time. Obviously looking after a baby is a lot harder than gallivanting around the world. But from a work perspective it’s the same: both parent and gallivanter are absent for a period of time. Your workplace will cope without you.
Don’t be indispensable
Crudely, if you got hit by a bus, your manager would replace you tomorrow. You can’t be indispensable. If you’re absent on a career break (for whatever reason), your colleagues will absorb your work or they’ll hire someone to replace you. You’ve probably done the same for them during their absences (I have). So why would they refuse to do the same for you?
The aim of life is to enjoy it
On a deeper level, ultimately I just want to enjoy my life. I’ve spent so long thinking life has to be a battle, and that you’re not achieving anything unless you’ve struggled for it. Now I just don’t think that has to be the case. Of course there are things we have to do in life that we don’t enjoy, but that doesn’t have to be the crux of it and that doesn’t mean that those things are a bigger achievement than something you haven’t had to struggle so much for. Life is there to be enjoyed and – I know this sounds cliché but it’s true – we don’t get a second chance.
Having the conversation about taking a career break to travel
I first raised my plans to travel long-term during my end-of-year appraisal. My supervisor asked me what my goals were going to be for the next year. I blurted out that I didn’t have any goals because I was planning to quit my job to travel.
My announcement was met with astonishment. I had always given the impression of being diligent and committed, and this seemed completely out of character. Why would someone like me want to throw away their career to do something as trivial as travel?
It was my manager who suggested the idea of me taking some time off and coming back, rather than quitting altogether. I was surprised by this suggestion as it was unprecedented at my workplace, where we don’t have a sabbatical policy. I went away and thought about it and decided that it was a good proposal. It would mean I didn’t have to worry about being unemployed when I got back, I didn’t have to worry so much about budgeting as I knew I would go straight back into paid employment, and I could put off the idea of a career change for now. I accepted, and my manager made it happen.
The conversations I had were difficult. But I would advise sticking to your guns. Some people won’t be able to understand why you would want to take a career break at all, let alone why you would want to travel, and they’ll try and make you feel bad about it. Remember it’s also in your workplace’s interests for you to stay – you taking a break is an extra piece of admin for them. But if you really want to do it then you can find a way to make it happen.
The effect of my career break on my career
So what happened when I returned from my career break? Was my career ruined?
My team held my position for me and I returned to it after six months of travelling. I had thought I would forget how to do my job but it only took me a few days to pick it back up again. I rebuilt my workload and I took some of my work back that I had handed over to others before I left.
The only discernible setback for my career was that I missed the opportunity to apply for a promotion that year because I was away for the application deadline. So effectively I held myself back a year. But in the grand scheme of a 40-year career, one year is absolutely minimal. And I think a six-month trip was a pretty good trade-off for a tiny delay in my career progression.
More importantly, I felt completely refreshed when I returned from my travels. I went back to work with a fresh mindset, which mainly involved keeping some more mental distance between myself and my work. I don’t care about annoying demands or angry correspondence as much as I used to and that’s a good thing as it has massively reduced my work stress. I used to get very wound up about difficult clients or managers but now I just try to accept them instead of fighting against them. Having a six-month career break has made a huge difference to my mental health and I no longer want to quit my profession (for now anyway).
A career break to travel will be worth it
In the end, my career break was earth-shattering for me but not for anybody else. It has made an indescribably significant difference to me. I’ve done so much that I wanted to do but couldn’t do with a full-time job. It felt like I was away forever because I was doing so many different things. I had sufficient distance from work to be able to reframe how I think about it.
For my colleagues back in London, I was absent for six months and now I’m back. They had a bit more work than usual in my absence but they managed to absorb it, in the same way I’ve absorbed their work when they’ve gone on shorter holidays or maternity leave. My absence made pretty much zero difference to them, and that’s the right outcome.