For a long time, I had no idea what J might be for. I googled it. Japan, Jordan and Jamaica. Three countries I’ve never been to, and besides, this A-Z is not meant to be that specific. I eventually came up with J is for Jobs and I think that’s a good one. You need money to travel and how do you get money? Jobs!
There are two elements to Jobs. There’s the job you have before or after your travels, to make the money in advance, to refill your coffers after your trip and to start saving for the next trip; and there’s the jobs you have while you’re away, to fund as you go along.
Jobs at home
There are so many options here. The option I personally use is that I have a permanent full-time job, with a salary and a contract (actually, I don’t have a contract. Must bring that subject back up on Monday!) and I travel using my weekends, bank holidays and annual leave allowance. Today is May 8th, the official bank holiday of the Coronation and I came back from Paris just this morning, having used the weekend to go away, flying from my local airport and not having used a single hour of my holiday allowance. That’s what I’ve done since my first trip away in 2008, just travelled around a full time job. It’s not romantic, it’s not quite what people dream of when they say they want to travel, but it’s practical.
If you want more flexibility, you have three options. You can go for agency work, so you request work when you’ve got the time and you don’t when you haven’t. You take short-term contracts, six or twelve months or whatever, so you know that when your job comes to an end, it’s travel time. Or you freelance, meaning you set your own timetable. Freelancing and agency are both riskier in that work and income are less reliable, which can make it harder to plan in advance, but on the other hand, high flexibility. With shorter contracts, you know when you’re working and when you’re not, but you have to start all over again when you get back, including with job hunting virtually from scratch, unless you’re lucky enough to find an employer who’ll cheerfully give you six months or a year’s work according to your whims. It’s not impossible. I know someone who uses this method but I get the feeling that the phases of not being able to travel because it’s a work period get quite monotonous and miserable for her.
Obviously, for the majority of us, working and saving so we can go travelling is the most obvious and workable answer. Money mostly doesn’t just appear in our bank accounts and airlines & hotels don’t just randomly contact us to give us free flights and rooms. You can get quite a lot of travelling done around having a “real job”. I know, the idea of taking a year off work and going off around the world is one that gets pushed at you quite hard when you’re young but now, several years on, I’m much happier with multiple shorter trips over my entire career, rather than having one big trip with huge gaps in between.
Jobs while travelling
Where do we start with this?
Well, there are ordinary jobs – bar work, cleaning, working at your hostel. It isn’t guaranteed that you’ll find a job, you may find you struggle with the language barrier and there may be visa implications to working in another country vs just being a tourist. If you’re working, you can’t be out enjoying yourself as much as you’d like, which means your trip might end up being longer than it would if you had the money in advance, and the extra nights’ accommodation might end up meaning that although you’re working, you’re paying out a lot more than you would have done if you weren’t. I’m sure I’ve heard of hostels employing people on the basis of free accommodation for a certain amount of work, so that might be an option which would balance the earning with the extra cost. People who work in bars generally get the days to themselves, so all they’re missing out on is the nightlife, which is inherent in their jobs.
Second, there’s getting a job abroad. I’m talking about things like being a ski rep, a tour guide, a boat skipper, that sort of thing, a “holidayish” seasonal job rather than a permanent boring “real” job. Because they know most of their employees are coming from abroad, accommodation is often provided but you’re likely to be sharing it with your colleagues. This can be a good compromise between having a “real job” and having an extended holiday. When (if!) I retire, I’d still like to do a season as a Eurocamp courier on a campsite somewhere. When I was younger, it was to be a Keycamp courier but Keycamp has been absorbed into its better-known sister company and I’ll have to tolerate the green instead of the blue.
Third, there’s anything along the spectrum of freelancing and being a digital nomad. Visa implications again, but it can also be a good compromise. There are so many jobs post-2020 that have gone remote and many of them aren’t tied to timezones. My job, for example. I have colleagues who’ll casually announce at the Monday Zoom meeting “I’m in Paris/Budapest/Riga this week”. There’s no real reason why I couldn’t just pack up my laptop and take my 9-5 normal office job with salary and benefits around the world. I know people who teach English online, I know people who edit videos, journalists, travel vloggers/bloggers/influencers – lots of people whose jobs aren’t tied to a particular place. Some of them do their own thing, some of them are employees and the only thing they have in common is that everyone eventually realises taking your laptop to the beach to do your work isn’t actually practical.
That latter is where “getting paid to travel” comes in, freelancing or digital nomadry using your travels and adventures as the material for your job, either as a content creator of some kind or as a travel journalist. Getting paid as a content creator isn’t as easy as you might think – for example, I’ve been blogging about my travels since 2015 and in March 2023, I earned £1.38 from it. Yes, one British pound and thirty-eight pennies. I know, blogging is dead and the money doesn’t come from ads, it comes from affiliate links and brand deals but I got chucked out of Amazon’s affiliate programme because it didn’t get enough clicks and I’m not going to get brand deals. I’m ok with that. I do this because I can’t not, but if you’re depending on it to fund your travels, best to have a backup plan, that’s all.
But unless you’ve inherited a large amount of money or you’ve won the lottery, you’re going to need to fund your travels one way or another and chances are, you’re going to have to do that via a job so have a think about what works for you.