Combine work & pleasure during your NYC holiday

There’s no such thing as a wasted professional opportunity, especially on holiday. Have you ever considered making the most of your traveling time to put it back into something valuable on your CV? Traveling doesn’t have to be a world away from your career, and, as much as you can enjoy a break in your everyday professional routine, there’s no reason why international experience couldn’t make you more valuable to your future employer. So how does this work, you ask. Let’s take the example of New York City, one of the favorite American city to visit for European travelers. On average, visitors spend between a week and two months in the Big Apple – depending on where they are in their professional career. There’s no reason why this time off work (or off university) couldn’t appear on your resume as a profitable and informative experience. In fact, there are plenty of ways to combine work and pleasure once in New York City.

1. A chance to work for existing freelancers

If you’re an independent entrepreneur, or a freelancer, who enjoys traveling to discover new horizons and maybe uncover new ideas, why couldn’t you combine your traveling fever with your career? You can find a lot of services that can help you to live a nomad life while keeping up with your work. You’ll find at the heart of New York City, Croissant 2.0, a fantastic coworking space that offers better features than your local coffee shop for an on-the-go work project. The coworking space has hundreds of free seats in exquisite working environments all over NYC so that you can visit and work at the same time. Visiting Soho for the morning? You can pop in The Farm to finish working on a project. Enjoying a lazy afternoon in around Central Park? You’ll find the perfect coworking space just a few streets away from the park.

2. There for a quick holiday? Write about it

What if you want to share your experience to help other travelers? There are plenty of travel magazines and websites that will pay you to share your knowledge of NYC and tips to others. Wanderlust, a British magazine, pays up to $325 for 1,000 words. Travel + Leisure Magazine is almost entirely written by freelancers and pays up to $1 per word, so that’s $500 for a short article about arriving in NYC and using the trendy limos of the JFK Car Service to get into town safely. Surely that’s a brilliant way to pay back for your travel!

3. Few weeks in NYC? Embrace the culture

If writing isn’t your thing, how about getting to know the specific melting pot culture of the Big Apple? The cultural diversity of NYC attracts millions of visitors every year, but it also attracts business partners and traders. If you don’t feel confident in sharing your experience to help other travelers, maybe you’ll enjoy maximizing your cultural understanding of the international dynamic of the city to get future employers the edge on business deals. You can even dine at the U.N. to experience not only the protocol of security but also to get a sense of the local approach to diplomacy. Or maybe you want to discover the cultural heritage, from the Chinese New Year Parade in February to the Columbus Day Parade in October.

4. Love to bake? NYC loves its food culture

If you’re a cook or a baker, don’t miss out on the opportunity to work with the local chefs and patissiers around town. NYC has a lot of prestigious restaurants – more than in London – and plenty of delicious boulangerie and bakeries. Working a few days or weeks with these guys can teach you a lot about how to keep your head cool and your dough rising in a busy environment. The best school of cooking is practice. So you could apply for an unpaid apprenticeship while visiting NYC. There are so many flavors that you know it’ll transform your approach to cooking.

5. Here for long? Help tourists discover the real NYC

If you’re staying for a long time, you could make the most of your local knowledge and your language skills to make tourists feel welcome in the Big Apple. Everyone wants to discover the New York City of locals, so who can help tourists best with this than another tourist? There are plenty of city guide tours on offer, and surely one of them will love your savvy knowledge of tourism in NYC and best places to try for visitors. That’s the perfect way to take tourists down Little Italy while making money to visit the big Italy!

If you thought that work and pleasure didn’t belong together in NYC, think again. There are many opportunities for visitors to boost their professional life while discovering the secrets of NYC. Seed your career in the Big Apple!