How to highlight your international experience on your resume
With most companies, working with international suppliers and customers, having international experience is a great asset to showcase on your resume. This highlights that you have been exposed to multiple cultures and are therefore able to adapt to a variety of situations.
1. Your experience abroad must appear on your resume. But how?
Knowing that recruiters read a lot of resumes, there are some key elements to consider when outlining your career history. Don’t downplay your experience and use it to your advantage when applying for roles after being overseas. The ability to absorb and adapt to new cultures is highly desirable, it shows fantastic skills such as flexibility, diversity in thinking and excellent people skills and cultural awareness.
2. Talk about your experience in the “title” section.
Although the “title” section is a part of LinkedIn profiles, more and more candidates decide to include a similar section at the beginning of their resume. This is how they showcase their most important skills and their experience abroad.
3. What did you learn and why is it important?
It is not just about the months you spent abroad. What adds value to your resume is what you learned while being there, what sets you apart from other candidates. For example, having been immersed in a culture, or the projects you have realised there. Outside of projects and technical skills, being abroad also enables you to highlight soft skills such as courage, problem solving skills, self-sufficiency and initiative.
4. Languages on your resume.
You should highlight your ability and experience in working with languages other than English. We also advise you to certify your knowledge upon your return. A resume containing an official language certification will be more appreciated than a resume that doesn’t have one.
5. Use the “bold” function.
Finally, you can typographically emphasise your international experience, although it is not advised to abuse this method. The use of the “bold” function can be useful for structuring the resume and helps the recruiter to identify the most important parts of the resume. Your stay abroad can be the parts that capture the attention of the recruiter. But be careful, what mainly interests the recruiter is to know what you learned during this experience.