Volunteering is nothing but giving back to the society for a better sense of living to those around you and yourself.
By volunteering in your favorite charity you not only feel a sense of happiness, accomplishment and satisfaction that you served the society but you also find business benefits along with perspectives by meeting new people.
Top 10 Ways How Volunteering Can Help You Land a Job:
But the biggest advantage that one gets for volunteering is a great career opportunity. It acts as a boost for your career.
Since working in an NGO exposes you to a variety of skills that will help you in your future job.
Benefits like making new friends and contacts, relationship skills, tolerance capacities, patience and people management skills etc.
Let us delve into this topic more seriously and list a number of reasons why the prospect of finding a job increases multi-fold when you volunteer.
1. Expansion of networks:
Firstly, one tends to expand his base that is an increase in the personal and professional networks.
When performing a certain group activity at your NGO center, it helps you make new friends while strengthening your already existing relationships. This way it broadens your networking site, engages you with people of the same thought and interests and lastly, makes it a fun filled atmosphere.
Now the resources you have at hand will help you boost your career in terms of finding a new job and better one too.
2. Career research:
Volunteering is a doorway to career exploration. It helps you try on different roles and responsibilities.
You get an exposure on many issues and scenarios. These situations give you an insight into real world problems. This may lead you to finding a new interest thereby a new career.
3. Adapting new skills:
Volunteering helps you learn and nurture new skills, it helps you realize talents that you may have not discovered at all.
For example, when a student volunteers he is used to producing research projects owing to his academic requirements. But in an NGO environment he could use these research skills for a certain purpose and along with which also use the data for publicity or marketing purposes.
Now, what he learns here is a new skill that is marketing. The opportunities that one gets to observe is many and thereby leverage them to find a better job.
4. Experience counts:
When managers recruit, they value the fact that an employer has volunteered for a certain stint.
From a certain survey that was conducted in 2013 about 76% of the recipients said that non-profit working experience was very crucial in their interview process.
5. Gaining additional skills:
When an employee has a long term break from his or her career, then it is volunteering that will save the concerned in the need of the hour.
Since we have already mentioned before that volunteering is a way of learning new skills and techniques, we shall now tell you how this could find you a job after a long gap.
When new attributes add to your resume, then newer firms and different genres of jobs will start calling you, owing to the new learning outcomes.
For example, one could gain expertise in crisis counselling while working for a women empowerment NGO. Or one could gain arty knowledge while volunteering for a museum, while that may lead to nurturing that interest.
6. Strong social networking skills:
Volunteering also helps in combating social networking issues. Relationship skills can be nurtured upon in the process.
Some of us by nature may be bold and confident. Ready to take on the world. But the rest of us may be the shy types and have a hard time meeting new people.
Volunteering actually indulges in making new friends and coming outside of this barrier.
Therefore, it helps you strengthen your ties with the community or your new friends. By this social networking and relationship skills are set in place.
7. Being positive:
Certain personal attributes such as self confidence and self reliance are set in place with volunteering opportunities.
It gives us a healthy mind and a peaceful attempt towards life. When you start giving a bit of yourself to the community by doing well to as many people as you can, then it automatically gives us a sense of content, pride, identity and accomplishment.
When one understands the fact that happiness lies in making people around you happy, then one learns to have a positive view of life.
8. Strong connections or bondings:
Resumes or profiles get more improvised. Practically, in today’s world one would need to have a strong LinkedIn profile to make a cut above the rest.
In today’s competitive world, the online business networking site is a grand hub and has become a primary option to find jobs.
This online site allows you to connect and affiliate yourself with anyone you have worked with.
So when potential recruiters step in, they will look at how strong your connections are and offer you a job interview.
9. Better knowledge of world outside:
More than anything volunteering helps you realize the on goings of the practical world. As in, it gives you an in depth knowledge of how certain sections of the world is crippled and need help.
We learn to provide them with love, care, help and sometimes monetary help too, that brings them to a different level of sustenance.
10. Conclusion:
Now that we have established the fact that volunteering does actually help us in getting a better job offer, we should strive to volunteer more often and make sure that our friends do the same too.
Many sections of the society who are ill, suffering from various disabilities, senior citizens who live in old age homes etc need the common man’s help. Aid should be provided to these people from all spheres of the economy.
But as a human, we as erudite citizens must take this extra step to serve the purpose. We are anyway benefiting in many ways and those ways are listed above.
So what are we waiting for?
Volunteering has many advantages to both the one serving and the one being served.
Hence, if we have anything to add to this article please feel free to do so. Reviews, feedback’s and constructive criticisms are all welcome.
