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Hobbies: how can they help your career? - Cultural skills

Leisure activities play a prominent role in your personal life and sometimes, without you knowing it, have a direct impact on your work. In addition to improving your quality of life, these activities help you to develop knowledge, specific skills and behavioural competences, otherwise known as "soft skills", which are highly sought after on the job market. Let's take a closer look at these transferable skills in professional life, derived from hobbies such as games, sports, culture or the art of collecting.
Skills By Maëlle Gillet

Cultural skills

Transferable skills culture travel language

Are you comfortable and enjoy interacting with people from different cultures and countries? Then you certainly have skills such as sensitivity, respect and curiosity: human qualities that will allow you to shine and make a difference in the workplace. Travelling and discovering are leisure activities that allow you to escape, to relax and sometimes even to discover yourself through the discovery of others. By confronting an environment or culture different from your own, you develop an open-mindedness that is indispensable in professional life. By leaving their comfort zone, all travellers have to deal with stress and the unexpected. They have to be more sociable because they have to communicate with others very often. These situations develop self-confidence which is one of the skills that you can put forward to recruiters and use throughout your professional life. 

Your experiences abroad, whether on holiday, during your studies or even when you are settling in for a longer period, are beneficial and develop skills that are transferable to your job. A study by American social scientists found that living abroad triggers self-reflection and develops "self-concept clarity", i.e. trusting yourself in a consistent and stable way over time. A quality that will allow you to build a solid professional career by daring to make decisions that seem to be the best for you, your needs and your desires. 

Travelling and exchanging also develops language skills that can be a real asset for joining companies that work internationally. As well as being fluent in a foreign language, travel will have helped you develop tolerance and sensitivity to the foreign cultures you are likely to work with. Thanks to these intercultural skills, collaboration will then be more fluid, because of the appropriate and respectful behaviour you will have towards your interlocutor.

 

Game skills

Sports skills

Collection and art skills

 

 

Source: https://start.lesechos.fr/au-quotidien/voyage-expatriation/vivre-a-letranger-permet-de-mieux-se-connaitre-selon-une-etude-1176449 

 

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