Every exchange programme, ours included, is sold partly on employability. You will come back more independent, more adaptable, better at working across cultures — and employers will notice.
The first two things are true, and most participants feel them within weeks. The third one deserves a closer look, because researchers have actually tested it, and the results are not what the brochures imply.
This is the honest version. It is more useful than the marketing version, and it ends somewhere better.
The experiment nobody puts in a brochure
In 2023, a research team working on the ErasmusCareers project sent out 2,100 fictitious job applications across Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain — 700 per country. The CVs were identical apart from one variable, tested in four conditions: no study abroad at all; study abroad listed on the CV; study abroad plus a brief mention in the motivation letter; and study abroad plus a detailed letter spelling out the intercultural and entrepreneurial skills the student had developed.
Then they counted interview invitations.
There was no statistically significant difference between any of the four conditions, in any of the three countries. Not even the version where the candidate explicitly explained what the experience had taught them. The authors’ own summary: studying abroad “does not increase the likelihood of being invited for a job interview, in contrast to common thinking.”
A German field experiment by Knut Petzold, sending 231 applications to real internship postings, found a small positive effect: applications mentioning international study got invitations slightly more often and slightly faster. But the effect was modest, and it concentrated at employers who had foreign branches.
If you have been told that a semester abroad is a differentiator on its own, that is the evidence against it.
What the same researcher found did work
Petzold ran a second study, a few years later, that is more useful — provided you read what it actually says.
He asked 101 German HR managers to rate 795 hypothetical applications, varying several factors at once. Three kinds of time abroad were in the mix: an internship abroad, a study exchange abroad, and private travel abroad.
All three raised hiring intentions. Ranked, internships abroad came first, study exchanges second, private stays last — though Petzold is explicit that the differences between those three were “rather small and not statistically significant.” So do not read that ordering as settled. Read it as a hint.
What was clearly stronger than any of them is the finding that matters: occupation-specific work experience. Time abroad was weighted roughly like a master’s degree, and well below actually having done the job before. Among employers with no foreign operations, none of the mobility effects reached significance at all.
Put those two studies together and a pattern shows up that is more useful than either alone. Employers are not responding much to the fact of having been somewhere. They respond to evidence of having done a job. The closer your time abroad looks to real work with real responsibility, the more of it survives the journey onto your CV.
This is why programmes built around working — Summer Work & Travel, a paid internship, a season as a camp counsellor — sit in a different category from a semester of lectures in another country. You come back with a role, a supervisor, tasks you owned, and problems you solved under pressure in a second language. That is the thing the research says employers actually weigh.
Employers hire evidence, not adjectives
There is a reason for all this, and it shows up in what employers say they want.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers surveys employers every year about what they look for in graduates. In the most recent round, their own framing was that employers are seeking graduates who provide evidence of polished teamwork, problem-solving and communication skills — examples of the skills in use, not the skill words themselves.
Put yourself on the other side of the desk. You have 200 applications. Nearly all of them say “adaptable,” “strong communicator,” “works well in teams,” “international experience.” None of those claims can be checked. What can be checked is a specific thing you did, with a specific outcome, that somebody else can confirm.
“I spent four months in the United States” is a claim. “I was one of three people running a 60-cover restaurant section through a July holiday weekend, in my second language, and I rewrote the shift handover sheet because we kept losing orders between shifts” is evidence.
Same four months. Completely different application.
What to do while you are there
If the goal is to come back with evidence rather than a line on a CV, the work starts on day one, not in the final week.
Keep a running record. A note on your phone is enough. Every time you solve something, fix something, or take responsibility for something, write down what happened and what changed. You will not remember in six months. Nobody does. This is the single highest-return habit of the whole trip and it costs about thirty seconds a time.
Ask for one piece of real responsibility. Not a promotion — a defined thing that is yours. Opening the shop. Training the new person. Handling the supplier who keeps getting the order wrong. Ask early, because managers are far more willing to hand something over to someone who has just arrived and is keen than to someone who is leaving in three weeks.
Get the reference before you leave. While your supervisor still remembers you clearly and is standing in front of you. An email address goes cold; a written paragraph and a connection on LinkedIn do not.
Produce something that outlives the job. A process you documented, a spreadsheet that made the rota work, photographs of an event you organised, a short write-up of how you solved a recurring problem. Artefacts travel. Memories do not.
Track numbers where they exist. How many covers, how many campers, how many hours, how much the thing you fixed was costing before you fixed it. You do not need impressive numbers. You need real ones.
The part people get wrong online
A related piece of received wisdom is worth correcting while we are here, because it makes students anxious about the wrong thing.
Yes, employers look you up. In a 2018 survey of over a thousand hiring managers run by the Harris Poll for CareerBuilder, 66% said they use search engines to research candidates, and 47% said they are less likely to interview someone they cannot find online at all. That survey has not been repeated since, so treat it as a snapshot rather than a trend.
And the panic about being screened out is overdone. In a Harris Poll survey of 1,002 US hiring decision-makers fielded in December 2022, 51% said they had never found anything on social media that disqualified a candidate, and 86% said they would still consider someone with no online presence. More pointedly, academic work has found that recruiter assessments based on candidates’ social media have essentially no relationship with later job performance — the practice is common and not very good.
So the useful instruction is not “delete your Instagram.” It is: make your claims checkable.
The most striking finding here comes from a field experiment run by ResumeGo over the winter of 2018–19, which sent 24,570 applications to real job openings with identical CVs, varying only the LinkedIn profile behind them. No profile produced a 7.9% callback rate. A bare-bones profile produced 7.2% — slightly worse than nothing. A comprehensive profile produced 13.5%.
It is a commercial study rather than a peer-reviewed one, and it is now several years old, so hold the exact numbers loosely. But the shape of it matches everything above: a half-built presence is worse than none, because it is a claim with nothing behind it. The thing that works is substance.
One page, done properly
If you take one practical step from this, make it this one: build a single page that holds the evidence.
Not a personal brand in the influencer sense. One clear page with your name on it, three or four things you have actually done, what the situation was, what you did, and what changed. Photos if you have them. A line about what you are looking for next.
It takes an afternoon. It costs nothing on most platforms. And it does the job that a CV line cannot: it makes an unverifiable adjective into a checkable fact.
The discipline behind it is the same one professional studios apply when they do brand strategy for a company — decide what you are actually for and who you are talking to before deciding how it should look. Most student portfolios fail on the first question, not the second. They are a gallery with no argument. Pick the two or three things you want to be hired for, and cut everything that does not support them.
So — is it worth going?
Yes, and the research is not really an argument against going. It is an argument against expecting the trip to do the work for you.
The Erasmus Impact Study found that 64% of employers give greater professional responsibility to staff with international experience, and that over a third of trainees abroad were offered a job by their host organisation. That study was commissioned by the programme’s own funder and does not correct for the fact that people who choose to go abroad may already be more ambitious — both caveats matter. But it points at something the callback experiments cannot see, because callback experiments only measure the first thirty seconds of a hiring process.
Here is the reconciliation that fits all of it. Time abroad does not get you the interview. It very often gets you the material that gets you the interview, and it changes how you perform once you are in the room.
Go. Work. Write down what you did. Come back with proof.
Sources
- Van Mol, Ozaist, Perez-Encinas & DiMarzo, Competence Recognition of Employers, ErasmusCareers project, 2023
- Petzold, K., Studying Abroad as a Sorting Criterion in the Recruitment Process, Journal of Studies in International Education, 2017
- Petzold, K., Heterogeneous effects of graduates’ international mobility on employers’ hiring intentions, Higher Education, 2021
- Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, National Association of Colleges and Employers
- Harris Poll for Express Employment Professionals, Social Media Integral to Recruiting, 2023
