Considering a job with lots of travel -- give me your pros and cons

Data point of one here. I have been in my position for almost ten years, and travel has always been a part of it. Somewhere in the middle there, Facetime became a viable thing, and I can tell you it had a dramatic impact on how much less burdensome travel is. It really is incredible how much it helps to be able to videochat with my wife and kids every evening when on the road - for us at least, it makes me being away a much less big deal. Given that, I think if I were in the position you describe, I'd take the new gig.

That's not a shit ton of travel. And you'll be home a lot more during the weeks when you ARE home. One thing to do is to take the burden off of the parent left home with the kiddos. So if the new job will allow you to hire a sitter, a house cleaner, some delivery and/or premade meals, so much the better. During the summer, you can bring everyone with you on some of the longer trips. I traveled a lot in one of my jobs and I rather enjoyed it. I didn't have kids though. If you can be happier in your work, I think this would be a great thing for you. But you know whose opinion most matters (besides your own?) Your wife's. If she's on-board and willing to experiment around to see how things work, I think you may both be very happy with the new gig. Plus international stuff is great for your career. Sometimes you make sacrifices now, for large payoffs later.

Depends on your age and your love of travel. If you do this, maximize everything. Frequent flyer miles on your personal accounts, hotel stay points, rental car points, travel expense points. Be ready to have some well made functional luggage and to have to financially float your travel expenses; keep track with five minutes to tally every day so you can submit for reimbursement quickly upon your return. Make special time per kid, as well, on your return - Daddy days - and relief for your spouse as well, sometimes a good "me-cation" is a trade off for travel, depending on her needs / wants / interests. As someone who supported a spouse with alternating 0% travel and 100% travel ... build some relief help into the budget. Babysitter night when you are on a long trip, laundry or food service, something. Video chatting with dad to practice spelling or math facts or have story time helped a lot.

I think this needs to be your wife's call. I know that it wouldn't be workable for my family. Putting myself in your wife's shoes, I'd worry that in addition to its obvious logistical burdens - being the only one to be there for the kids 40% of the time - I think it would by necessity require your wife to sort of build a different emotional infrastructure to take care of her needs 40% of the time, and I know that would be a dangerous thing for my marriage.

I’ve been on a travel assignment for close to 18 months now. I can’t speak to the family aspects, since I’m single with no kids and my travel is a little different than what you would be doing – I travel every week to the same city. I think lots of people have given you good advice on the wife and family front, but how is all this travel going to impact you? If you end up not liking the actual travel, that’s going to impact your family too. The things that I would consider are: -How do you like flying? I’m able to always take direct flights of around 2.5 hours, but that still translates to almost 7 hours of travel each time I fly, and I find those days totally exhausting. Are you going to end up tired and grouchy on the first day you are home from each trip? -How do you feel about living in hotels? And what kind of hotels will you be staying in? Short term it always seems relaxing to stay in a hotel, but it can get to be a grind living out of a suitcase in one room. Also, are you going to be able to spend time away from the hotel in the evenings? It can be a real effort to not just collapse on the bed in front of the TV and order room service every night. -It took less than 2 weeks for me to go from loving eating out for every meal to hating it. And some of my colleagues that travel with me have put on considerable weight in the past 18 months from all the eating out. -What are the expectations of working hours when you are traveling? It is sort of assumed at my company that when we are traveling we really don’t have anything else to be doing, so we should be putting in long hours. This can be tough when you want to make time to video chat with the family, eat a decent dinner and work-out/relax. -How flexible is the scheduling of your trips? Are you going to end up locked into a trip that is going to create a conflict with your family? Knowing what I know now, I still would have accepted this assignment, but I wish I had a better idea going in how hard it was going to be on me. All I really thought about before saying yes was the extra money and the advancement opportunities and not that much about what the day to day would be like, so I would say to really spend some time thinking about that.

My dad travelled so much for work he essentially lived elsewhere 80-90% of the time for a couple years while I was growing up. It didn't really affect me but it was hell on my mother who had to parent AND work all the time without a break. They had no choice, it was either he take the job or they lose their house, so it was felt to be a team effort and joint sacrafice (he would never have choosen to be away from us willingly). This is not the case here and you have the luxury to choose what works best for the whole family. What you are describing is you having a bunch of responsibility-free mini-vacations that improve your life/career and massively negatively impact your wife's life (and your children's lives). If you are gone sat-sun (8 days), being home Mon-Wed is not really a fair compensation, especially if during that time your children will be in school and your wife working so you essentially get more "me alone time". This way breeds resentment. Would the new position allow your wife to drop her current level of income-producing work and hire help to replace what you will no longer be able to do? Can she ramp up her social life so she won't feel so isolated? How will that work with childcare and will she feel guilty about using childcare so much more? Does this mean she can't do some things in her career because she knows you will be unable to provide the logistical support? Are all the periods together going to be on YOUR schedule or will she be able to say, "ok, you are away sat-sun for eight days, don't take the next three days off, instead take the Thursday off and then Tuesday of the following week and Friday on the 6th so we can spend time together then when it fits in my schedule"? From here, all the pros are in your column and all the cons are in her (and the kids) column. You need to move some cons over to affect you and put a lot of pros in her column. A good test is to imagine the roles reversed; if your wife was offered this opportunity what would you need to change about your lives to make this work? I did a lot of travelling for work for a while - and I loved it as it was very intellectually stimulating and a great leadership role - but it was a huge amount of work for me (as primary caregiver of my children they came with me 75% of the time) and my parents (who looked after the children when I could not bring them). Taking kids on business trips generally sucks for them, there is nowhere enough time to do anything fun with them, I was constantly torn between looking after them and work (ducking out of meetings, leaving earlier than the men that didn't have children, etc), spent a tonne of money to compensate for what I wasn't present for in their lives, and I worked in a VERY pro-family environment. I was completely exhausted, constantly. I look forward to picking up that job, when I no longer have young children who will be so negatively impacted.

My husband is gone Mo-Th for about 40 weeks per year. We have a 6-old boy. Occasionally he is home for a week or even two in a row, and then gone again. While your travel pattern as you describe it would be different and more irregular, I think there are enough similarities to share experience. What it means for me is I have to basically arrange our everyday life as if I were a single parent. And in addition deal with our son's reactions to the absences. You say your children are school age - even while child care may not be a problem their emotional lives wil be affected. Not necessarily badly (interesting reports above on how people experienced their parent being away for work). But it is a factor to be aware of and she will have to deal with it alone. What I am trying to say is it will heavily impact your wife's life. It does not need to be a diseaster at all, it works quite well for us in fact on the whole, but it is drain on the parent remaining behind. One of the reasons it works well for us is because my husband has quite a lot of control over the dates he will be absent. So he can actually schedule around dates which will be important to either our son (presentations at kindergarten, plays, his birthday) or to me (I work flexible hours most of the time but not always, sometimes I do evenings or early morning). So I would look into that: how much control will you have over when you go and for how long a stretch? And when you are not travelling and not staying home in exchange for travel, will you need to work from a local office? Or from home? From what you wrote I was not sure but if you actually were to travel Sunday to Saturday and then home Mo-We and then off again Thursday, this is not much compensation in my mind. As others have pointed out depending on where you live and where you go to you can easily spend hours and hours in travel. Look at travel times door to door rather than flight time form city A to city B. If you need to travel on to remote sites this will not only extend travel time but can jeopardise your return flight. since we had the child my husband commutes just to a neighbor country, to avoid being trapped by missed connections due to remote sites. His company arranges every detail of the trips, door to door and he is paid door to door. Do consider who arranges the travel, if will you need to do it it will take up your time and nerves. Consider reimbursement etc, my husband is meticoulos with that (has to be) but it does take time, and his taxes also take more time than for other people (but then that may be local tax law). One area where his job has seriously affected our live choces is that we need to remain in a city with an international airport in order to keep travel times reasonable. We would prefer to live a less urban life and move into the country but this would easily add 4 hours to the commute each way and so is just not feasable.

My mom was stay-at-home until I went to school at age 5, at which point she took a job that required that she be away for 3-4 days at a time, usually during the week but sometimes the travel would bleed over to the weekend. During certain times of year these trips would happen 3-4 times a month, while at other times there would be no travel for a solid couple of months. These trips were in addition to her regular work hours; if a trip bled into the weekend, then she just got overtime and effectively lost the weekend. My dad worked full time. My mom had this job for about 2.5 years if I remember correctly, and left that job solely because she was given a better offer close to home. In my experience, it worked out fine. My mom would make up a calendar showing what times she would be able to receive phone calls from me. It wasn't very often, and it was often late at night (I don't remember exactly what time; it may have been only an hour or two past my bedtime). I didn't mind because I got to stay up late sometimes to call her. She would also leave scavenger hunt-type games for me and my dad to play. There were some nights when I was sad that my mom wasn't around, but overall it worked out fine, and I don't feel that it was a difficult time for the family at all. In fact, I kind of enjoyed being able to stay up in my room reading after bedtime - my mom would check on me to make sure I was actually in bed, but my dad always fell asleep before me, so I could stay awake as long as I didn't make any noise. I am an only child, FWIW.

I've been assured that I would be free to take extensive time off between trips. The previous incumbent in this job confirmed that this was the case. This is the sort of thing that I would deh-heh-hefinitely want in writing as an official benefit, rather than relying on "confirmation" from the current person holding the job.