Volunteering can help students gain invaluable experience
The lack of employment experience is one of the biggest hurdles faced by students and recent graduates entering the workforce. With strategic thinking, volunteering is one effective way to gain experience.
Valerie Millette, coordinator of the Leadership Initiative Volunteer Engagement (LIVE) Centre, suggests students first consider setting a goal. “You have to break it down. What skills will that job require? What kind of contacts do you think will help you get into that job? What field are you interested in working in?”
She says the goal could be to identify and develop one skill. For example, someone may want to improve their French-language skills. which will affect where they choose to volunteer.
Millette says it is helpful to think about the skills a prospective employerneeds. She points out that while many graduates have the technical knowledge needed to perform a job, what sets the successful applicant apart is to build up transferable skills.
“Those are the skills that make the biggest difference in whether people are hired or not, over and above the technical skills. In an interview setting, employers will note that applicants have the same technical skills, and will look for the candidate who will be able to communicate, work with a team, show initiative, and leadership.”
Millette says summer is a good time for students to consider volunteer work because they are generally busy during the school year. She suggests creating a project and suggesting it to the group they want to volunteer for. This allows the volunteer to run a short-term intensive project and demonstrate initiative while developing transferable skills for future employment.
However, strategic volunteering does not necessarily have to be related to a job search.
“Any volunteering in which anybody takes the time to think about their goals and sets out to find opportunities to achieve that goal is strategic. We often think about strategic volunteering in a career-related way, which of course it can be, but it can be any objective,” she says.
A student may start volunteering to gain experience for their CV, and find out that they really enjoy working with people to the extent that they may change their field of study.
Paulo Roberto Fumaneri, a Concordia student and assistant at the LIVE Centre, has first-hand experience of how volunteering can transform a student’s life. As an undergraduate studying finance in Brazil, he volunteered at a hospital and worked with chiId cancer patients, as well as at a retirement home and a hospital for children with disabilities.
“Those three places changed my life. The time I spent with them was the happiest moment of my day. I realized that this is what life is really about.” He says he was inspired by the vitality of the children and moved by how much he gained through spending time with them.
The experience made him re-evaluate his own career goals and led him to work in community development, steering him towards his current studies in the Department of Applied Human Sciences.
“I see how volunteering changed my life and see how it is changing the lives of the students who come here and I’m happy to be doing that.”
The LIVE Centre is open all summer. Students who want to find out more about volunteering opportunities can visit the Centre during drop-in hours, and follow the LIVE team on Facebook to learn about upcoming events.
Related links:
• LIVE Centre site (including drop-in hours)
• LIVE Centre on Facebook