Volunteering is a great way to develop new skills outside of your degree in your spare time. You will often receive high-quality training from staff within the organisation you volunteer completely free of charge, and oftentimes you will work alongside paid staff who you can learn from and gain industry knowledge.
But it’s one thing to develop new skills and learn new things; it’s another to articulate these in your CV, job applications and interviews to enhance your employability and showcase your achievements. This article will give you some top tips on how to indicate your experiences once you start navigating the job market to make you stand out in applications.
- Be specific
When describing your volunteering experiences in your CV, cover letter or in an interview, it’s really important to be specific. Recruiters typically spend less than 10 seconds looking at a CV before passing it on to the next person, so it’s important to be clear and concise with your words. It’s also super important to use active language and verbs to describe your experience. Active words have been highlighted in bold in this article.
Make sure you list specific projects and activities you were involved in. This could be mentioning a particular programme by name, or the title of the activity. Make it clear what your role was in this (Organiser, Facilitator, Manager, Coordinator etc.)
For example:
“As a Climate Workshop Facilitator, I delivered classes to primary school children weekly on water sanitation and waste education.”
“As a Marketing volunteer, I researched, designed and implemented a new social media strategy for the charity on Instagram and their website.”
- Quantify
As with all job applications, the key is to quantify your achievements as much as you can. Make it really clear what the impact of your work was on various stakeholders – this could be on the communities your organisation supports, staff at the organisation or other volunteers. By doing this, it signals to employers exactly how your work contrbuted to meaningful changes and improvements in the provision of a service.
For example:
“I conducted research for a report that supported refugee women and children to integrate into their new host community. The report supported 200 families across the space of 3 months to settle into their new community.”
- Using real stories
This point is more relevant to the interview stage of a job application, where you’ll often be asked to give examples of when you provided a specific service or reacted to a situation. Voluntary experiences often provide great examples of these as no two days are the same and much of voluntary work involves problem solving and helping others. For these sorts of questions, it’s great to use real examples of how your work impacted another person and their testimonials of thanks, if you have them.
For example:
“I mentored a secondary school student for 6 months to increase his confidence, helped him set goals for his future and gave him insights about studying engineering. At the end of the programme, he had successfully applied to an apprenticeship scheme at college. He thanked me for my support, and we meet regularly to continue the mentor-mentee relationship and learn from each other.”
You can book a 1-2-1 with the Senior Community Volunteering Officer to discuss any of this in more detail here.
For more general information on how to write your CV, see this document put together by City Careers.