The Rise of the Adult Gap Year

When people ask what I do for work, I typically describe myself as a “guidance counsellor for gap years.” I lead the non-profit Canadian Gap Year Association, which, up until the last few years, mostly involved helping soon-to-be high school grads figure out what to do with their time off between degrees. Many delay post-secondary to earn money, take breaks for their mental health or travel the world. Then, last spring, someone booked a session to plan for a gap year partly spent walking the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage route across Europe. The twist? He was a 55-year-old lawyer.

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In the last three years, our organization has been flooded with requests for help from working adults. They use different terms to describe their planned pauses, like “sabbatical,” “career pivot” and even “mini-retirement.” But they share an underlying motivation for their breaks: they’re done with life as they know it. According to Mental Health Research Canada, nearly 40 per cent of Canadian workers reported feeling burnt out in 2025. The rise of hybrid work culture during COVID also opened people up to the idea that their lives could be structured differently, perhaps with a bit more balance. Some of this shift is generational, too. Millennial workers, in particular, came of age in an era of skyrocketing living costs, which delayed or ruled out traditional adult milestones like homeownership and having children. Naturally, they began asking themselves, “If life no longer follows a predictable path, why should my career?”

Thanks to all of the above, the demographics of the “gappers” contacting our organization are extremely broad. One person I worked with was a Toronto-based HR specialist in her mid-30s. Just a short time into her career, she’d become jaded by the high-pressure hustle culture of the tech sector, where companies sometimes take off and implode within a few years. She wanted to take a bit of time to transition into a different field. Meanwhile, some of our clients in their 50s and 60s—at the tail end of their careers—are planning what I call “golden gap years.” For some Canadians, 65 isn’t a desirable or, in some cases, reasonable retirement age anymore. By and large, we’re living longer, and many of us simply can’t afford to stop working. Instead, our senior clients are opting for shorter, intentional interludes off (to travel or pursue other goals) before fully retiring, instead of deferring those dreams until the end of their lives.

The range of experiences available to gappers sometimes shocks them. Some folks house-sit in Australia, plant trees in the wilderness of B.C. or teach English in South Korea in exchange for room and board. I recently helped a family book a 15-day guided tour through Morocco as part of their gap-year travel blitz, and arranged for another woman to stay with a host family in Costa Rica, where she volunteered with a sea-turtle conservation project. Other pursuits keep gappers closer to home, like spending six months concentrating on caring for an aging parent or investing in a creative or entrepreneurial project they previously didn’t have the time to focus on.

Taking a gap year in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis can seem highly impractical—and, for some Canadians, it is. Unless they have robust savings or a partner with a well-paying, flexible job, sabbatical planning (done right) often takes years: building a nest egg, sorting out temporary schooling for kids overseas if necessary and navigating other complex variables, like bills and mortgage payments. But for some, a short-term break is a springboard to better financial outcomes in the long run, especially as AI drastically reshapes the world of work.

Recruiting employers are placing an increasingly high value on “micro-credentials,” seeking targeted skills applicable to their specific workplaces as opposed to broad degrees. Canadian universities and colleges have even started rolling out short-term certificate programs to quickly upskill experienced workers. The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, for example, offers a six-week AI-strategy micro-credential program, and the British Columbia Institute of Technology now has an AI-fluency micro-credential certificate for business professionals. Initiatives like these can help gappers return to the workforce more relevant and resilient than ever, assuaging the fear that taking a break always means falling behind.

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Still, more needs to be done to make gap years accessible to more Canadians. Unless you work in law, higher education or one of a few other select industries, it’s unlikely structured time off is baked into your contract. Some organizations that already offer parental leave or paid mental-health leave hesitate at the idea of adding mini-retirements to their benefit packages because of the upfront cost. But these planned gaps could very well end up saving them money: employee burnout can cost Canadian employers up to $28,500 per worker each year. Offering temporary leave can help address attrition before it escalates into disability claims or lengthy absences. And companies that do prioritize prevention have a 27 per cent burnout rate on average, compared to a 47 per cent rate for employers who take no action.

One existing model is the tiered-sabbatical policy. After three years with a company, for example, some employees become eligible for a three-month sabbatical, with longer breaks tied to longer tenure. The breaks are meaningful incentives both to join the organization and remain there—especially at a time when employee turnover across Canada is worryingly high. That type of arrangement could also bring some welcome security to people who want a guarantee that their job will be there when they return (similar to how parental leave works). 

One positive consequence of the pandemic was that it exposed just how unsustainable North American work culture had become. For a brief moment, people were rethinking their relationships to work and reasserting control over how they lived. Yet, only a few years later, return-to-office mandates have restored the same conditions that left Canadians exhausted in the first place. Adult gap years are one way for them to reclaim some of the autonomy that, very recently, felt within reach.

Michelle Dittmer is the executive director of the Canadian Gap Year Association, a non-profit, partly federally funded organization that provides gap-year resources to individuals and families.

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