This blog post focuses on volunteering.
Volunteering is a great opportunity to develop skills, make a contribution, or support a cause.
Less formal than internships, volunteering can be beneficial to you. When you volunteer, you receive intangible benefits that do not necessarily translate into a salary or promotion.
Acquiring New Skills
You can use your abilities or acquire new skills. Volunteering gives you an opportunity to learn outside the classroom to enhance your education. Besides a particular set of skills, you will also learn to work in a team, make decisions, and get better at planning.
Building Community
Volunteering is a great way to meet new people in the community. These people can come from different backgrounds, but might have similar interests as you. This can be a good way to polish your social skills, communication habits, and develop emotional intelligence.
Boost Your Self-Esteem
Besides building community, volunteering can help you boost your self-esteem. When you volunteer, you are less focused on yourself. This can have a positive effect on your thoughts, as you replace worry or anxiety with action.
Develop a Mindset of Giving to Others
The most important lesson that you can learn from volunteering is to create the mindset of giving to others. Asking yourself about the ways that you contribute to people, a company or an organization is key to getting ahead. This mindset can help you stand out as a job candidate, as most candidates think first about what they can get from a job instead of asking what they can give.
Do you know that the “Volunteer Experience” section in LinkedIn allows you to use up to 2,000 characters? Yes, you can write up to 100 characters for each organization.
Volunteer experience is valued by recruiters. In writing your résumé or updating your LinkedIn profile, make sure that you identify the organization, your role, and the cause.
If you are a LinkedIn member, you can share your volunteer work and include the following categories:
- Animal Welfare
- Arts and Culture
- Children
- Civil Rights and Social Action
- Economic Empowerment
- Education
- Environment
- Health
- Human Rights
- Disaster and Humanitarian Relief
- Politics
- Poverty Alleviation
- Science and Technology
- Social Services
- Veteran Support
You can find volunteer opportunities at www.internships.com or through Americorps.
You do not need to wait for places to announce volunteer opportunities. You can always go to a local agency and offer your time.
If you decide to volunteer, make sure to learn as much as you can about the company: their mission, service, and the people they serve. Knowledge is power. By the way, you need to develop the ability to know how to find information about an organization. This skill will be useful to your job search.
Be strategic in your volunteering experience. If you volunteer for a cause that is meaningful to you or that will help you in the future, it is more likely that you will continue doing the work.
Have you done volunteer work? What causes do you support? What have you learned?