Every year thousands of young college and university graduates decide to take a gap year in order to expand their life experience through travel, personal study, or volunteer work. While the primary purpose of most gap years is leisure, adding one to your resume can actually increase your chances of career success.

"It’s important to differentiate yourself in today’s competitive graduate job market," says Paul Lyons, the managing director of recruitment specialist Ambition. "And a gap year lets you do that."

According to Lyons, apart from helping you stand out from the crowd, a gap year also has the professional advantage of demonstrating your life skills and positive personality traits. In fact, depending on the particulars of your gap year experience, if you and another candidate with equally strong academic results are short-listed, your time out can be the difference between you winning or losing that top job.

"Knowing how you arrived at your gap year and what you achieved is valuable information to employers," says Lyons. "For example, a self-planned, self-funded year spent canoeing down the Amazon is likely to be better regarded professionally than a structured year, funded by parents, spent learning Spanish in Barcelona."

So how should you present your gap year on your resume? Well, it’s a bit like deciding which bits to tell your grandma about. After the partying has been thoroughly toned down or omitted entirely, the achievements that you’re proudest of should be highlighted in a short paragraph on the front page. Any additional information can be included in the body.

Remember to emphasize how your gap year challenged you to develop new talents, such as setting attainable goals or recognizing cultural assumptions, and encouraged you to draw on those resources you never knew you had.

"Many important life and social skills are learned on a gap year," says Lyons. "Responsibility and teamwork transfer particularly well to the workplace, as they’re useful for driving decision making, initiative, and communication."

As for the current trend towards volunteering abroad, Lyons says it’s only one possible dimension to a gap year.

"However there’s no doubt that it gives people a much greater perspective on how others live," he says. "This in turn reinforces desirable personal qualities, such as humility or generosity, which are also attractive to employers."