Travel as a Career
Source: nattu at flickr
The following is a rough list of the jobs that allow you to get paid to travel, or write it off as a business expense:
1. Airline pilot or flight attendant
The downside to this is you generally are visiting the same places over and over again. The upside is you get to fly cheaply as an airline employee for personal vacations.
2. Travel Writer
There are travel magazines and web sites who need to publish fresh content every month. Certainly getting a job at “Luxury Hotels Magazine” would be a very very cool job to have. (Is there such a magazine?)
3. English Teacher
May not be the most glamorous job in the world, but if you’ve always wanted to try living a couple of years in Asia, there are places looking for English teachers. Korea is a favorite destination for this.
4. Brand-Name Consultant
I’ve known people who travel to another city for a few weeks doing consulting. If you have such specialized knowledge that there is noone local who can do the job for less, there are companies that will pay for your flights, food, hotel rooms, and/or give you a reasonable living expense on top of your base (high) consulting rate.
5. Blogger
A relatively new career – a form of travel writer. But instead of writing for a magazine that will pay you for articles, you are writing for yourself. You post your stuff to your web site, and sell advertisements or your own products on the side.
6. Location Independent Professional
The Internet allows many wonderful things, including the ability to “work from home”. If your company allows you to work from home almost full time, why not work from Europe? Or Australia?
Better yet, you can do any type of job that you can do remotely, even if you’re working for yourself. Copy writer, book editor, web designer, pizza phone order person.
7. Professional Gambler
There are certainly people who make a living going to casinos and playing in card tournaments. I met a guy once who made $140,000 a year from Blackjack not including expenses. Now his expenses happened to be $100,000 a year. But he’s still putting $40,000 a year in the bank and living in some of the nicer hotels in some of the nicer locations in the world.
8. Photographer
If you have a talent for outdoor photography, you certainly can travel the world, selling your photographs (online, stock photos, for specific clients, etc.) to pay for your travel habit.
9. Musician, Artist, Travelling Minstrel
In fact, any type of creative artist is generally free to practice their art anywhere in the world, right? There are no such thing as travelling dentists, and quite frankly who would want to go to a dentist who is only in town for a couple of weeks never to come back. But artists don’t have an office, and if you can make money as a musician, why not go from gig to gig, from town to town, as long as there are people willing to pay you for it?
10. Reporter
Traditional journalists need to often be where the story is. Sure, we live in a day and age where people can put together a reasonable story with information collected online. But we will never get away from needing people on the scene – from video game trade shows in Vegas, to political upheavals in countries 4000 miles away.
11. Superhero
If there’s one thing you can say about Superman, it’s that he got to see the world. Not sure how he lived such an extravigant lifestyle on a reporter’s salary though. Did he need luggage on his travels? A change of clothes? Or did he just come home every night. Part of the joy of travel is staying somewhere overnight too, so he missed out on part of the fun if that was so.
Can you think of any other careers that let you travel? Post them in the comments!
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