Volunteering has many benefits, including enhancing professional relations, engaging in leadership activities, exploring new roles and forging new friendships. In addition to these benefits of volunteering, individuals create an experience that automatically develops transferable skills. While the consensus is to put your volunteer hours in one section of your resume, there is a constructive yet unique way to display this.
Recognizing Your Skills:
The first step to acknowledging your development from volunteering is understanding what you have done. For example, if you volunteer to help the older generation with technology, you should pick up communication. In this skill, you can say your communication tone has adapted to reflect your patience and ability to foster connections with new individuals. Additionally, a volunteer experience would be working with animal care. Here, the key skills would be adaptability and responsibility. Both of these skills are essential when caring for animals, making them straightforward and self-explanatory. A more complex volunteer experience involving multiple tasks can be framed into time management and stress control. Some of Youth Central’s volunteer shifts involve cooking, hence you must manage multiple areas at the same time. This level of stress replicates the nature of any skilled job. For instance, applying for a corporate job involves handling emails and working on multiple projects; hence, time management and stress management are crucial skills. While each volunteer experience will have its own skill, you must choose what you feel during the shift. If your main duty involved leading a group of people, ask yourself what skills allowed you to interact or manage this duty. The skills described above can be broad; therefore, you should provide specific details under each skill to demonstrate your expertise on your profile.
Thought Catalog. Published on February 27, 2017.
Professional Connections:
This portion may seem as easy as crafting a LinkedIn account; however, the key to truly persuading others is quality. You must have quality in your resume, which is the opposite of listing numbers and activities. Seeking guidance and reviewing other portfolios is the first step towards marketing your talent. Here, you must analyze good and bad resumes while comparing them to your own. Furthermore, you can reach out to professionals in your desired career field to ask for insight into their role and requirements. Then compare the skills they suggest to your volunteer experience. How are these skills used in your volunteering? While this is not limited to volunteer experience only, the volunteering you display should serve a purpose in demonstrating your true talents.
Real World Impact
While building a career and finding a full-time job is further in the future for youth, the volunteer skills displayed in your portfolio can benefit you in other ways! Firstly, you can use these skills for a university application in which you should choose certain volunteer experience which would be more relevant for universities than a company. For example, multitasking can be useful on a university application as it lets admissions officers view your capabilities of handling a degree program. Furthermore, skills like communication from working with children would be useful for a business or teaching degree. High school internships or extracurricular roles in a program are also great places to show off your skillset. Organizations led by youth often look for individuals who can lead. Through your volunteer shifts, you would have shown leadership when initiating conversations, providing new and useful perspectives, and organizing an event.
Another note to make when measuring volunteer impact through skills is being able to use numbers in the right way. Instead of using numbers to show the number of volunteer shifts attended, you should give a rough estimate of how many people you have assisted or the number of hours you have spent enhancing a skill.
Conclusion
In conclusion, any volunteering you have done can be useful in your future as it shapes your abilities. While volunteering can seem tiring and repetitive, it is training you for future instances when these skills will come in handy. No matter what type of volunteering you participate in, the results are advantageous.