sstorkel

While everyone here, who probably has an established career and a good job already, is telling you to "go for it" allow me to inject a dose of reality...

Having no real-world work experience in your chosen field 3-4 years after graduating will make it more difficult to find a job. Not impossible, but definitely more difficult. At larger companies, your CV will end up in the HR department where someone will note the absence of relevant experience and dump it in the trash. You'll probably have better luck at a smaller company, like the one where I work. Still, if I had your CV and wanted to interview you it might be a tough sell to other employees and managers. They'd want to know whether your knowledge was still current given how long you'd gone without work in the field, whether we'd put money into training you only to have to disappear on another tour, etc. I think you'd have to be an absolutely stellar candidate to erase the doubts that that would come up.

Of course, much depends on your chosen profession. In some fields, there's less need to "stay current" than in others, for example. Still, I think you'd find things much easier if you worked for a few years and established a reputation before you went on a long tour. That's the route I took: worked for about 5 years, then took six months off to travel (with a ton of money in the bank, I might add). When I was done traveling, I came back and had a previous co-worker hire me within 5 days of stepping off the plane...