Combine business with leisure and see the globe without denting your salary.

Can grown-ups take a gap year? Traditionally seen as something to get out of your system pre- and post-university, they’re best known for fire poi, full moon parties and ill-advised tattoos. But for a new generation of workers, a salaried sabbatical is becoming a routine part of a varied and rewarding career.

Recent research from Harris Group found that 72 per cent of millennials prefer to invest in experiences rather than material goods, which explains the rise of sharing services such as WeWork, Airbnb and Uber that facilitate access rather than ownership. This shift is playing out in the workplace, too, with a successful career no longer being defined by longevity but by diversity.

As older generations pursue closed-door immigration policies and wall building, millennial workers are becoming increasingly footloose and global. According to Forbes, they will also account for 75 per cent of the global workforce by 2025, so the tide of change could be coming. Should you stop seeing your job as a means to an end (ie, to a mortgage) and start approaching it as a way to experience the world?

Millennial workers are the first generation to have come of age in the full glare of social media, and this expanded network of far-flung friends and colleagues is fuelling their wanderlust. They are more culturally curious than any generation before them, with Forbes reporting that 86 per cent love to experience new cultures compared to just 28 per cent who love to shop (a slightly strange contrast, perhaps, but one that hints at a desire to explore rather than consume).

Don’t be fooled, however. This is far from the anti-capitalist, dropout and get-high, flower power movement of the 1960s. Instead, we’re seeing the dawn of the digital nomad, a worker with the technological tools to set up office anywhere in the world. Implacably opposed to the structure and stricture of a nine-to-five office job, the digital nomad sees no division between business and leisure, causing commentators such as The Future Laboratory to coin the word “bleisure” in describing their new world view.

So where to start in becoming a digital nomad? Remote work is often the gateway, as it allows you to keep the safety net of your current job while allowing much of the flexibility of nomadism. So make the case for operating in a new market or time zone to your boss and see if they’re open to you extending a work trip by a few days. This will give you a sense of whether the lifestyle is the right one for you before you pursue longer-term commitments through the likes of Jobbatical, Remote Year or Roam (see below).

Making the transition from office worker to global traveller can be a daunting one, but there are now a whole host of services and resources to help you make the move. Sites such as Nomad List have sprung up to help in planning your journey and discovering employment opportunities, while the Slack group #nomads is one of the platform’s fastest growing communities. Providing even more security, businesses such as Jobbatical provide placements in salaried roles around the world – from Kuala Lumpur to Nairobi – acting as a kind of online dating service connecting talent with far-flung jobs.

Remote working is also on the rise, meaning that you can keep your existing role with an employer in London or New York, but put in the hours from a beach in Bali. US startup Remote Year was set up to facilitate just this, organising co-working space, accommodation, visas and an annual itinerary for remote workers in return for a percentage of their monthly wage. And if you’re happy to go it alone and hustle freelance work as you travel, try Roam, the co-living and co-working membership club that operates locations from Miami to Madrid. One monthly fee will take care of all your accommodation and office logistics, meaning that a change of scene is as simple as booking a flight.

Before embarking on a working sabbatical, it’s important to establish what you want to get out of it: experience new cultures? Build a global network? Good Instagram opportunities? These different priorities will dictate where you set up shop. Nomad List regularly publishes global rankings of the best places to work remotely based on a range of metrics, from speedy Wi-Fi to living costs and local culture, so be sure to check out the practicalities. Current frontrunners include Chiang Mai in Thailand and Prague in the Czech Republic, so do your research, lay your plans and pack your bags.

Our lives used to follow a tripartite structure of education followed by employment and then retirement, but this is being replaced by a desire for lifelong self-improvement. Education no longer ends at university, and services are springing up that allow you to better yourself in a bleisure environment.

Imagine a mix between Burning Man and a Ted conference taking place on a cruise liner and you’ll get somewhere close to the concept of Summit At Sea. Riding the waves from Miami to the Bahamas late last year, 3,000 attendees took in talks from the likes of Google-founder Mr Eric Schmidt, film director Mr Quentin Tarantino and environmental activist Ms Erin Brockovich, while enjoying a range of business workshops and leisure activities. For knowledge-hungry digital nomads, it seems that holidays are no longer an opportunity to unplug and unwind, but a chance to expand their minds (and professional networks) while getting a tan.

Educational travel is also booming, with operators such as Further Future taking the festival format and reinventing it for San Francisco’s tech elite. The event provides all the activities you’d expect from a major tech trade fair, but under the guise of an alternative gathering in the Nevada desert. Indeed, the international agenda of bleisure events is now so busy that it’s become a full-time lifestyle for some, with tech-industry insiders describing the constant shuffle from Web Summit to Davos, Lisbon to Las Vegas, as “The Circuit”.

Whether you’re ready to make the full-time move to The Circuit’s peripatetic existence, or just looking for a year of travel and flexibility, the new services being ushered in by digital nomadism mean that a working sabbatical could now be within your reach. So stop seeing your job as a necessary evil and start seeing it as your round-the-world ticket.

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