Debatable: Is Volunteering Still Helpful for Career Growth Today?
Written by Uche Okeleke
Building a career as a young person isn't an easy road to travel. It takes dedication, it demands focus and discipline, it consumes time and grit and it requires a lot of sacrifice a young person might be unwilling to make. For instance, you might have to make decisions that are not popular among your peers. You would seem uncool or even be mocked for being a nerd. You would often make the hard choice of staying in to study for that professional exam while your cool friends are out there having the time of their lives as it may seem.
The payoff of those sacrifices is much a matter for another article outside of this one. One other factor of unease in your career building I haven't mentioned in the previous paragraph is risk. Yes, risk. Building a career is a long path laced with taking risks. You would find that every decision you make is choosing one calculated risk over the other. And so, the choice of volunteering or not presents a risk calculation as well. A few decades back, there was no question about the overall benefits of volunteering, however, in these times where many other alternatives have been opened up to young professionals to attain most, if not all of the pros of volunteering, one has to take a closer look at the decision and weigh the exclusive pros against the potential cons of volunteering as a means of boosting your career growth.
Let's look at what you benefit from volunteering.
- You acquire new skills. More often than not, every time you volunteer for a substantial length of time, you are going to leave with some skill you never had. The beautiful thing about this is the skills you gain might not be something you anticipated. You might go to volunteer as a stock admin for a charity that gives out free footwear to community children. Of course you're thinking you would gain some record keeping skills. But then you end up with a solid time management skill on top of it as a result of certain conditions you were made to work under.
- You make new connections and maybe even friends. Often times, the key to advancement in career is in the quality of your network. If that aspect is missing in your portfolio so far maybe because you didn't try much to make friends at school or you would like to get connections of a different social strata than you already have, volunteering can do that for you. Understand that the key to quality connections is for you to be a quality connection too. Be valuable to people in your own capacity and means just as much as you want them to be valuable to you in their capacity and means.
- It adds quality to your resume. There are different reasons for needing this aspect. If you are having a hard luck with securing regular employment in the actual job that suits your career path the most, volunteering for that role with a great organization is a way to not only furnish your CV with that vital work experience but also get your foot at the door with potential employers. Also, you could be between jobs and we know how quite unsightly a gap in employment history is to employers. To save you the burden of explaining those four months of gap in your CV to every interviewer, you might just want to get yourself into a volunteer role while you seek the permanent job. Whichever of these is your reason for volunteering, it certainly adds to your experience time for employers who require a certain duration of experience in a field.
- Volunteering would improve your confidence on the job. Say you had just trained to be a chef but then you begin to doubt yourself. You're not sure you can actually do a good job of being the main chef of a proper restaurant even though you want it badly. You can volunteer at a fairly newly established mid or lower rating restaurant as the main chef. The restaurant is in desperate need of a chef who doesn't add to the payroll burden, you need a practice ground. Perfect. Do it as long as it takes for you to get confident and become as good as you wish then you can begin to seek other placements. Or your input might have turned the fortunes of the once struggling restaurant that they can now afford to pay you for your service.
- You might be at a place where you are still exploring a career option and isn't concrete sure if a path or job type is what suits you. Volunteering is a good way to settle the internal debate. After a few weeks of volunteering you should be able to tell if it's what you want to do or not. Sometimes, you are sure what you want to do but you are still hazy about what should be your career objectives within that field. Volunteering helps you get an insight into the inner workings of the chosen industry and helps you decide what is to be pursued fiercely and what is to be taken less seriously.
On the flip side, there a are a good number of downside to volunteering you need to seriously consider as just one of them could outweigh all the potential benefits depending on your unique situation.
- One primary disadvantage is that of financial compensation. Most volunteer roles are not paid. If anything, you may even be the one bleeding money. You would have to transport to work while being responsible for your regular living expenses with money from other means. It's easier if you are still young and live with parents. But generally you want to consider this really hard before making the decision to volunteer. Why this is so important is that financial challenges could ruin the whole volunteering experience for you such that whatever benefits you were supposed to get from it would crumble. Take for instance you struggle with transport fees and other living expenses and this makes you become irregular at work or distracts you from giving your best and focusing at work. You end up not gaining any valuable skills, or understanding the trade well enough to make anything of it. And you can kiss goodbye to any chance of your boss recommending you for employment or referral with other companies. I would advice that you strongly consider how long you are willing to work for free before starting so you can have an exit plan you can put into effect once things begin to look bad. Understand your enthusiasm and motivation would potentially go south once you see others getting paid for the same thing you're doing for free within the company. It gets even worse when you begin to get better at the job than those colleagues.
- Most companies take excess advantage of the volunteer by making them work longer hours. Since they are not paid, it is tempting to want to make the volunteer work longer than the paid employee. The physical and emotional fatigue that arises from this can be deleterious to your volunteering objectives.
- Most companies who take volunteers are already poorly funded and badly structured such that there is no real chance of mentoring going on for you as a volunteer. It also means things could be upside down and confusing at work. This can demoralize the volunteer and discourage you from continuing in that career. If you have chosen to volunteer because you wanted to get a practical sense of that industry, you would be given the wrong impression of the industry by this poorly structured company and that could lead you into making a flawed decision based on incorrect information.
- Companies who take volunteers often don't ever have plans of eventually paying for that role or to transit the volunteer into a paid position within the company. This is a total bummer if your goal is to get a foot at the door for a paid employment.
- Volunteering is not a fail proof strategy to getting a paid gig and isn't always a pretty rose on your Resume. Prospective employers would be tempted to offer you less pay when they can see you have worked for free elsewhere. Worse still, they might try to convince you to start with them as a volunteer too with a less than solid promise of advancing into a paid contract.
- Job searching is increasingly becoming a job in itself as per the time it consumes. Volunteering can rob you of the quality time and concentration you need to put into searching for a proper paid job.
From all we have discussed, you can see that whether volunteering adds to your career growth depends on your unique situation, what point you are in your career and what you purpose for volunteering is. What I would advice is for you to consider all the factors and decide for yourself if you want to do it or not.