How can volunteering benefit you? Here’s how you can use volunteering for your skills and CV building!
For our second instalment for Volunteering Week, we’ll be talking about skills and how volunteering could help build your CV and your academic and workplace skills!
Volunteering isn’t completely divorced from learning; some roles take and develop skills that are important in workplaces and academics. An example of how volunteering could be directly applicable to skills used more widely in jobs are those surrounding technical roles such as being part of a Communications Team but many other job roles do benefit indirectly from skills picked up while doing volunteering!
Interpersonal Skills
A lot of roles will involve communication in a team, as a result this is one of the easier skills to illustrate the importance of. Workplaces do value good team players and having lots of experience of team-based work will go a long way with this.
Events Management
Volunteering is a great place to get experience for events management and event running. Typically this type of experience is difficult to receive as many workplaces have events ran by management staff instead. It is useful to elevate your opportunities in the workplace from entry-level, and could be suitable to justify applying for roles higher up in the chain.
Bespoke Skillsets
Some volunteering roles offer opportunities that are outside of the typical job skillsets, such as helping with craft-related activities, which may be of use to those with a more creative industrial focus (Art and design, etc.)
Enrichment
Volunteering shows you are willing to put extra effort and dedication for enriching your community and yourself, which helps paint you as a proactive worker. This can be valuable in a situation where you are one of many applicants for a position.
How can I record these skills in an ‘official’ academic format?
The HEAR (Higher Education Achievement Report) provides a single comprehensive record of your achievements. It is an extended digital transcript you and employers can access securely which contains detailed information about your learning and achievements, volunteering is recognised within this report, so it is very useful to show off those skills!
Want to add to your HEAR?
You can add volunteering opportunities you’ve helped with to your Volunteering Profile, that will be added to your HEAR!
If you are looking for more volunteering opportunities, we post articles regularly on the website which can be seen here.
This page shows various websites/locations that have numerous opportunities available.