A group of African high school students recently spent several weeks in Vermont as part of a cultural exchange and leadership program, splitting time between community service projects, local host families, and workshops on collaboration and public speaking. Programs like this are easy to file away as a nice cultural experience, but for the students taking part, they function as a surprisingly effective form of career preparation, one that looks very different from a summer job or internship.

The career-building part isn’t about a specific technical skill picked up during the trip. It’s about the compressed practice these programs force on teenagers: working alongside people who grew up in a completely different context, adjusting communication style when the usual cultural shortcuts don’t apply, and representing a group or an idea to strangers who have no existing reason to listen. Those are the same underlying skills that show up on almost every list of what employers say new graduates lack.

Students who go through these programs also tend to come back with a clearer, more specific sense of what kind of work environment energizes them versus drains them. Some discover they thrive on the ambiguity of cross-cultural collaboration and start looking at international relations, global health, or development work. Others realize they prefer more structured, familiar environments, which is just as useful a data point for planning a career path.

For a family evaluating whether an exchange or leadership program is worth the cost and time away from a normal summer, the return on investment shows up less in a resume line and more in how a teenager talks about people and problems differently once they’re back.