🌎 How to make your international experience really count on your CV!

You may take your international experience for granted. But what if the skills you have developed abroad are among your most valuable professional assets?

Why I believe we underestimate our international experience?

Through my work in cross-cultural management, global leadership development and career development, I have become increasingly interested in a question that many expatriates eventually face: how do we translate what we have learned from living internationally into professional value that employers can recognise?

As someone who has worked on these questions both academically and practically, I see a recurring challenge. People who have spent years abroad often struggle to articulate the capabilities they have developed along the way.

The irony is that the very experiences that have changed how they communicate, work with others and navigate uncertainty can become so familiar that they no longer recognise their value.

I see this question reflected in my work with Club Projet Pro in Amsterdam, a community initiative supporting French-speaking expatriates in their career development.

When we discuss CVs, professional transitions and the local job market, an important challenge emerges: how can we make the value of an international journey visible to recruiters?

The answer is not simply to add more international keywords to a CV. It is to understand what our experiences have taught us, identify the capabilities behind them and learn how to demonstrate those capabilities in a professional context.

💡 International experience is more than a list of countries

From a cross-cultural management perspective, living abroad can offer opportunities to develop skills that are increasingly relevant in organisations: navigating different expectations, communicating across cultural boundaries, building trust and adapting our behaviour to unfamiliar situations.

But exposure alone does not guarantee learning.

Living in another country does not automatically make us interculturally competent, just as working with international colleagues does not necessarily mean we know how to collaborate effectively across cultures.

What matters is how we respond to these experiences.

Do we question our assumptions? Do we learn to recognise different communication styles? Can we adapt our approach without losing sight of our objectives? Are we able to turn misunderstandings into opportunities for clarification and learning?

These are the questions that move us beyond the simple fact of having lived abroad.

International experience becomes professional capital when we can explain not only what we encountered, but also how we responded, what we learned and how we can apply that learning elsewhere.

👉 From reflection to action: a practical approach

This is also the principle behind the reflection exercise I use in career-development discussions: helping people move from a broad claim about their qualities to concrete evidence of their capabilities.

Choose one experience from your international journey and ask yourself four questions:

1. What was the challenge? Identify the situation that required you to adapt, learn or find a solution.

2. What did I do concretely? Describe the actions you took rather than the qualities you believe you possess.

3. What did I learn or improve? Identify the capability you developed or strengthened.

4. Where could this capability be useful professionally? Connect your learning to the needs of an organisation, team or role.

For example, “I am adaptable” might become:

“Integrated into an unfamiliar professional environment by identifying key stakeholders, learning local working practices and building relationships to support effective collaboration.”

The second statement is stronger because it describes observable behaviours. It gives a recruiter a clearer understanding of what the candidate can contribute.

This approach also helps expatriates prepare for interviews, where they can bring the experience to life through a specific example and explain the outcome.

The objective is not to embellish a CV. It is to make genuine capabilities visible.

👉 Why this matters for expatriates and accompanying partners

For accompanying partners in particular, international mobility can create a complicated professional narrative. A move may involve leaving a position, stepping away from a career path, changing industries or spending time outside paid employment.

In these circumstances, it can be tempting to focus on what has been interrupted or lost.

Yet career development is not always linear, and professional learning does not stop when a conventional job does.

Through volunteering, community initiatives, networking, learning a language or navigating a new professional environment, some expatriates develop capabilities that are relevant to their next career step.

The important task is to identify those capabilities honestly, distinguish personal growth from demonstrable professional competence, and find credible examples of how they have been applied.

This is one reason I believe career reflection matters so much: it helps people move from a vague feeling that they have gained something abroad to a clear understanding of what they can offer an employer.

👉 Your international experience deserves a place in your professional story

My work in cross-cultural management and career development has reinforced my interest in the connection between experience, learning and professional identity.

Expatriation can challenge our assumptions, broaden our perspectives and change the way we approach relationships, work and uncertainty.

But these benefits do not necessarily translate into career opportunities unless we can articulate them.

We need to do more than list countries, describe ourselves as open-minded or claim an international mindset.

We need to identify the situations that shaped us, the actions we took and the capabilities we can now demonstrate.

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So, the next time you look at your CV, ask yourself three questions:

What can I do today that I could not do before? What experience helped me develop that capability? And where could it make a difference professionally?

Your international journey does not need to speak for itself. You can give it a voice.

And that may be the first step towards turning your expatriation into genuine career capital.