by Peter Davy After a summer that included the wettest July for a century, you do not need to be a recent graduate to be thinking about leaving the country. But it helps.

The number of graduates taking a gap year is expected to soar this year and many will head abroad.It is easy to see why. With graduate vacancies down 13.5 per cent, many face a choice: watch the nights close in here as one of 835,000 18 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training, or head for Australia, where it is the start of spring, and train to become a surf instructor.

“If you haven’t been able to secure a graduate job, you can find yourself in quite a negative place,” says Tom Griffiths, the founder of gapyear.com. “You call yourself unemployed and it can be hard to keep a direction.

“If you decide you are on a gap year, though, it gives you all these options.” It can also, he argues, mean a job when you return, by making your CV stand out from the crowd.
Employers tend to agree. Claire Snell, graduate talent manager at Unilever, says that about half of its graduate trainees have taken gap years, and they can “significantly bolster a candidate’s CV”. The figure is similar at Waitrose. Mark Sims, head of graduate recruitment, says he welcomes them for the contribution they can make to developing well-rounded people. “They do seem to have some benefit for applicants,” he says.

That is not always the case. The Timescolumnist Sathnam Sanghera recently observed that there are two sorts of gap years: those spent helping orphans in the developing world and those that are effectively year-long holidays. The latter, he warned, are “as valuable on a CV as a coffee stain”.

It is true that not all gap years are seen in the same light by employers. “It’s now almost more common to have a gap year than not, so employers are looking for something that sets you apart,” says Marlon Lloyd Malcolm at the recruitment firm Graduate Fasttrack.

That could mean charity work abroad but Lloyd Malcolm argues that a few weeks with one of the “voluntourism” travel companies may be of little benefit. Work experience at home, learning a foreign language or setting up your own business might be better, perhaps with some travelling.
The key is to set clear goals and to be able to explain to an employer how the experience has made you a better candidate.

As Naeema Pasha at Reading University’s Careers Advice Centre puts it, you need to think about the end of the gap year before you start: “It might not be what you want to concentrate on when you go off around the world, but don’t leave career planning until you’re on the flight home.”