How Volunteering Will Help You Land Your Dream Job

If you are wondering whether you should invest your time and energy to volunteer, you definitely should. You can immediately form a list of benefits by volunteering just from the top of your head. For one, volunteering can be a great chance for you to travel and meet people from different backgrounds. Moreover, it is also a channel to give back to your own community. 

However, it does not end there. If you play your cards right, volunteering can offer you the perfect leverage when applying for a job. It can fill your resume with meaningful experience and catch the recruiter’s attention at first glance. Thus, not only is volunteering one of the most effective ways to develop yourself personally, but it can also support you during job hunting.

But how exactly can you utilize it? Well, read on because you are about to find out.

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Flash-Out Your Soft-Skills

Let’s put aside the matter of what you are actually doing while volunteering because you can be teaching or giving out food for homeless people or anything. Yet, that is not what you want to bring up on your resume. Instead, focus on the soft skills which are generally universal and easy to transfer across fields.

For example, regardless of what your dream job is, most likely, it will require teamwork and communication skills. Therefore, you can prove your ability to work in a collaborative environment and possess great public speaking skills by citing your volunteering work. Of course, you have to be very specific about it, you need to mention which tasks that require you to perform in a team or speak in front of other people.

The same thing goes for other soft skills such as time management, cultural awareness, and adaptability.

Get a Reference

When you are volunteering for an organization, you can get a new reference for your next job or even a post-secondary program. Naturally, to be able to get a good reference, you need to perform your best whilst volunteering. Secondly, be sure who you are asking for a reference from. Make sure that that person is someone who knows your work and appreciates it.

Some volunteering organizations even provide work certificates, meaning you will get a certificate by default upon finishing your volunteering. In these certificates, usually there will be a section where it says in detail how many hours in total you have volunteered and the specific skills you picked up throughout that period.

Proving Your Passion and Growth Mindset

There is no better way to prove that you are a passionate person with a growth mindset other than volunteering. Doing community work shows that you have the passion to learn and expand your horizons over things that may not be directly concerning you. Show recruiters how your volunteering work has helped you improve yourself personally and professionally. You can also share insights and learnings you find along the way.

Wrapping up, when applying to become a volunteer, be sure that you can commit to the whole program. Your goal of “filling your resume” should be secondary to the actual volunteering work. If you do not put your heart into this work and only expect the rewards, then nothing will come out good for you. Other than that, you should definitely just go for a volunteering project!

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