Help others and enhance your career through volunteering

Volunteering features many benefits, but do you know it can boost your career as well? Many people engage in volunteer work to help a cause or a community. Doing so gives them a feeling of satisfaction and the benefits for both the individual and initiative can be plentiful. Now, consider how that volunteer experience can support your career development, whether it’s in a personal (supporting a local nonprofit) or professional (serving on a committee for an industry association related to your job or career) context. Another thing to consider is that employers highly value volunteer experience, and in some cases, regard it as just as important as paid work experience! Consider how volunteering can help your career in terms of developing skills, building your network, and communicating your professional brand.

You can develop relevant skills.

You can learn new skills through volunteering or strengthen your existing skills. Volunteering is a great way to develop foundational skills, which are skills that transfer and apply to many different situations. Examples of foundational skills include communication, teamwork, leadership, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. You can also develop hard or technical skills, which include things like programming languages and computer applications to language skills and welding. Those are skills more related to technical knowledge and training. Regardless of the types of skills, you can build them in new and exciting ways. Then, you can apply those skills to your professional life and integrate them into your resume.

You can build your network by meeting new people.

Connecting with people through a volunteer experience can be considered informal networking, as you are meeting people as a by-product of your activity and not meeting them specifically for the purpose of networking. The people you meet can become a part of your support system, and they may even be able to connect you with professionals in your field of interest. Remember, everyone has a network! The co-chair of the volunteer project you are working on may have a sister that works at a company that interests you. That can lead to a great connection, and a trusted resource (the co-chair) that can vouch for your skills and personality. Volunteering is a natural way to meet like-minded people in a friendly and low-pressure way.

You can boost both your confidence and reputation.

If you are doing good work, building new skills, collaborating with others, and supporting a cause that’s important to you, it can help you gain confidence in your abilities that you can take into the professional world. Your volunteer experience can help you answer behavioral based interview questions such as, “Tell me about a time you encountered a challenge and what you did to resolve it?” As for your reputation, many employers look for team players that are helpful and willing to sincerely dedicate themselves to initiatives, in some cases for no benefit of their own. Your volunteer experience can illustrate that you’ve dedicated your time and energy in the past to helping others in some way and that you are community-minded. Hiring managers value candidates that are both confident and have a good reputation, as those elements directly relate to how a candidate can perform and fit within a company’s culture.

You can engage in volunteer work in order to help a cause, make a difference, or fulfill a personal goal. All of those things are wonderful! As a bonus, the benefits you can gain in relation to your career include the skills you’ll develop, the network you’ll build, and the confidence and positive reputation you will acquire.