Dan Black, Ernst & Young's director of campus recruiting for the Americas, says that as far as he is concerned, young applicants who have served in the Peace Corps or worked overseas in an internship or other job have a leg up on everyone else.  "We definitely see overseas experience as an advantage," he says. He directs campus hiring for the London-based accounting and consulting giant, which has 140,000 employees worldwide. "Our clients are demanding more of us these days," he explains. "They want diversity of thought and diversity of values, and many of our clients are multinationals."  In Pictures: How A Job Abroad Can Give Your Career A Big Boost  Among the most attractive places for foreign experience, from Ernst & Young's perspective: China and Brazil, two emerging markets where growth is strong. "We can't get enough hiring done for our Brazil practice," Black notes. Russia is also big, he adds.  Not only new hires but mid-career professionals, too, can get a boost from a foreign posting. One of Black's friends in Ernst & Young's financial services practice did a three-year stint in Tokyo, returned to New York and was promoted to partner. The Japanese sojourn probably shaved a year or two off the man's promotion track, Black says.  Foreign postings can help you leap ahead in government and nonprofit careers as well, says Nina Segal, an international career development consultant in New York and author of International Jobs: Where They Are and How to Get Them. A friend of Segal's who was stuck in an administrative position at the United Nations volunteered to move to two African hot spots where elections were being held, Liberia and Sierra Leone. That experience helped him leap from an administrative role onto the U.N.'s professional staff. "He went to challenging locations at pivotal times in those countries," Segal notes.  Mary Anne Walsh, a New York career and executive coach who specializes in global talent management, has a number of American clients who moved overseas shortly after college and graduate school. They advanced much more quickly than if they had tried to climb the career ladder in the U.S. One young woman who works in financial services is already doing deals with senior Chinese executives even though she doesn't speak Mandarin.  Another client of Walsh's headed to London for a financial services job straight from college. Then he went to Hong Kong. He lost that job, but he was quickly snatched up by a boutique firm. Now 30 years old, he was recently hired by Goldman Sachs ( GS - news - people ) in Asia. "Over there, the recession was just a blip on the radar screen," Walsh notes.  Dawn Chandler, a management professor at California Polytechnic State University, notes that spending time abroad can teach workers to deal with very different leadership styles. In Scandinavian countries, for instance, leadership is more egalitarian and participatory and less authoritarian. In Asia, on the other hand, the gulf in power between junior employees and leaders is much deeper. The U.S. falls somewhere in between.
Foreign experience shows bosses that you're unusually adaptable and versatile. It can put you on a fast track for advancement.