Cat Sanctuary Or Cancer Research? How To Choose The Right Volunteer Position To Get The Job You Want

You might be a student ready to embark on a gap year, looking to change your career or trying to impress potential employers in a glutted job market but whatever your motivations, volunteering can be very beneficial to your CV, your well being and the well being of others.

However, there are so many opportunities for volunteer work it can be tricky to determine which organization provides the most benefits in terms of your impact on the world and on your employment prospects.

Here are some points to consider when you’re trying to work out how, why and for whom to volunteer.

1. The Question of Motivation.
Human beings are complicated. It’s probable that you have a range of different reasons for entering the volunteer market and it’s important that you take time out to look at these reasons closely. Take ten minutes to write down everything you want from the volunteering experience down. Don’t think, just write, no matter how ridiculous the stuff that flows from your pen.

After the ten minutes is up, read everything through and reflect on what feels most true for you, personally. You’re not a bad person if you want to volunteer for reasons other than the purely altr

uistic – it’s just important to be honest with yourself so that you can target the kind of work you want with more precision. Most likely you’ll have a clutch of different reasons, both altruistic and self-serving, it’s just important that you know what they are.

2. Cats vs. Cancer - The Question of Worthiness.
It’s no good forcing yourself into a volunteer position you don’t enjoy or don’t believe in just because you think it will look good to others or because it is the ‘right’ thing to do. Working for free is as strenuous as paid work – you might feel virtuous at first, but unpaid work f

or something that you don’t enjoy is unsustainable as a long term model. So, if you’re torn between similar positions at an animal or a human charity for example, don’t plump for the more ‘worthy’ cause over the one that simply interests you more. You’re going to learn more and do a much better job for everyone involved if you’re engaged.

3. The Question Of Experience
One of the virtues of volunteer work is that it allows you to gain new skills and take on responsibilities that perhaps would not be accessible to you in your current or prospective paid employment.

With this in mind, it’s important to target the kind of work you want to pursue for your main career. If you want to work in fashion retail, it’s very difficult to get that first job without some kind of experience. So go down to your local charity shop and take it upon yourself to engage with their clothing department – get involved with dressing the window, become familiar with the customer base, get as much money handling expertise as you can. This is equally true for more office-based vocations – if you want to work in sales or marketing, then look into fund-raising and event planning. If you’re passionate about social media then set up and maintain Twitter feed for your organization.

If their website’s terrible, can you build them a new one? If you have always wanted to do it, odds are you can. Volunteering work can have a flexibility that allows you to work off your own initiative in manner that can be truly exhilarating.

Attached Images:

• License: Creative Commons image source

Sam Wright blogs about business, the job market and improving your employability.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2013 at 9:07 am and is filed under Career, Job Search, Networking, Specialization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.