This webinar focuses on:
1) Strategic Volunteerism - what is it and how do you strategically volunteer
2) Assessing your Volunteer Contributions - what are you really doing and how can it be measured
3) Documenting your Volunteer Work - building a portfolio and adding your volunteer work to your resume
4. Volunteers
Volunteer Experience = Work Experience
Session 1 of 1
What is your Experience?
• What is your formal role?
• What tasks do you preform?
• How do you help the bottom
line?
5. Volunteers
Volunteer Experience = Work Experience
Session 1 of 1
Documenting Your
Volunteer Work
• Job Descriptions
• Evaluations
• Certificates / Awards
• Samples of Projects
• Photos
• Hours
6. Volunteers
Volunteer Experience = Work Experience
Session 1 of 1
Suzie Volunteer
123 Any Street
Town, St Zip
Phone Email
Manager Town,
St
Army Unit 05/2010-present
*FRG leader ACCOMPLISHMENTS
7. Volunteers
Volunteer Experience = Work Experience
Session 1 of 1
Suzie Volunteer
Address Phone Email
Accomplishments
• Accomplishment
• Accomplishment
Work Experience
Manager Town, St
Army Unit 05/2010-present
8. Volunteers
Volunteer Experience = Work Experience
Session 1 of 1
Accomplishments, Accomplishments,
Accomplishments!
Context
Challenge
Action
Result
Welcome to this session on
Today, we will cover
Strategic Volunteerism
Assessing your Volunteer Contributions
Documenting your Volunteer Work
Before we delve deeper into today’s topic I want to know more about you!
POLL:
How many volunteer positions do you currently hold?
None
1-2
3-4
5 or more
PLEASE SHARE YOUR WHY YOU VOLUNTEER BY TYPING THE REASON OR REASONS IN THE QUESTION BOX
There is no right or wrong reason to volunteer. Many people do not volunteer to gain work experience or for any reason other than provide support to a person or organization.
Can you share why you volunteer in the question box? While they are completing this share why you have volunteer.
Some reasons might include:
Passion for the organization
Support a friend or family member
Something to do
Gain work experience
One way to volunteer is strategically. A strategy is defined as “a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result” <dictionary.com> When you volunteer strategically you are focused on a goal. This could be a number of things to include exploring or gaining experience in a career field, learning or trying out new skills, filling an employment gap or networking to try to get a job in the organization.
Can anyone share a way they have strategically volunteered?
One of the volunteers on our team mentioned one of the reasons she wanted to volunteer was to expand her training experience to include on-line training. This same volunteer has accumulated over 3,000 volunteer hours and utilized this on her resume to document work to include creating training materials, leading a FRG group and managing volunteers. She strategically volunteered to expand her experience and keep her employment gap.
How did she do that? She strategically volunteered focusing on her career field and developing her skills by:
Selectively choosing where to volunteer – she chose to volunteer for organizations where she could work in her career field – her FRG as an advisor, Girl Scouts as an adult trainer and her church as a religious education instructor.
Volunteering for specific work that would expand her experience – she focused her work on training, supervised unit FRG’s making sure they followed and understood the Army regulations related to the FRG and outreach bringing organizations to unit FRG’s across the country
Found ways to expand her skills by using volunteer work to expand her skills. For example, she built a Facebook page and learned how to build a Virtual FRG web page for her unit and held monthly conference calls coordinating training for the brigade FRG volunteers and FRL’s. She joined the VTT to gain experience in training via webinar.
Even if you have not been using your volunteer work to build career experience, you can document what you have done. How do you start to do this?
What is your role or title? Is there an equivalent title for this job in a work environment?
An FRG leader may be a manager. A family day organizer may be an event planner.
What roles do you have in your FRG or have you held that would translate to a work title?
What tasks do you preform or roles do you play in your volunteer role? Make a list – think like a business owner.
Let’s take a position many volunteers love doing, but don’t realize what they all do. If you are the person who mans the coffee station on drill weekends what might be some skills you provide? <sample answers: customer service, purchasing supplies, handling money>
How does this same position affect the bottom line – after all a business wants to know how you are going to make them money, save them money or make them more efficient.
How does the coffee station affect the bottom line? <Possible answers: build morale, increase sales by x%, provide $ in funds to support unit activities>
Documenting your volunteer work is important. Have you heard of a “love me” book? This is a portfolio that complies you experience. Some things you might include in this book that will help you in documenting your work further include:
Job descriptions. If you are volunteering for an FRG you are likely to have a formal job description. If you don’t ask for one! Many organizations have these.
Evaluations: On a job you normally receive formal evaluations. Your FRSA, volunteer manager, FRL or commander may be willing to meet with you to do this. Some volunteer positions provide regular written evaluations
Certificates and Awards: These will also document your experience. Often they will outline specific accomplishments for you.
Samples of projects or work: Newsletters, training presentations and reports are examples of these. What other types of projects might you have samples of? <possible answers: fliers, snapshots of facebook pages and statistics showing how much the page has grown>
Photos: of you preforming volunteer work or being presented with an award as well as articles in newsletters or papers
Your hour list: This can document your work, especially if you are applying for a federal job! This can provide you with documented experience!
What else might be good to include? <Possible Answers: training certificates, letters of recommendation from FRSA, FRL or commander>
Okay, so you have sat down and realized how much you have done now how do you document all of this on a resume?
It depends on the situation. There are different types of resumes and different ways to document your volunteer work. You can include your volunteer work as a part of your job history.
In this slide you see how you could list your volunteer experience in a chronological resume. Notice that the title is “manager” and we show “FRG leader accomplishments” You don’t have to use the official title of FRG leader since a business owner probably would not know what that means. You also notice you don’t have to say “volunteer”.
Another type of resume is called a functional resume. Here you list your accomplishments at the beginning and then list your work experience. There are a number of reasons you may want to use this format. If you are changing career fields or have an eclectic job history this may work well for you.
The key with any resume is that you should not merely list job duties, but focus on accomplishments. This is what will set your resume apart from the rest. By the way, they should also be directly related to the job you are applying for.
Accomplishments are going to help you really stand out. The accomplishments on your resume should be directly related to the position you are applying for.
One way to look at building accomplishments is the CCAR format.
Context - title of your job or role you are playing in this example; the context sets the stage for your story.
Challenge - what was the challenge of this example or project? Why is this a good example for this particular job duty?
Action - what were your specific actions in this case? How do they show your mastery of this specific job duty?
Results - what happened? Again, how does this relate to the specific job duty?
This format helps you look at what you have done and the results. Remember, businesses want to know 3 things:
How can you make them money
How can you save them money
How can you make them more efficient so they can save or make more money
If you are applying for a position as a store manager and one of the job duties is to provide marketing support. An FRG leader might easily be able to address this specific position. Let’s look at something an FRG leader might face:
Context – As the FRG leader at a unit with little family involvement
Challenge – there was little participation in unit events and needed to get more families to attend
Action – created unit facebook page, wrote monthly newsletter and gave briefings to unit members at battle assemblies
Results – brought attendance at events from 98 to 145
How might you word this on a resume?
Created a multi-pronged marketing campaign consisting of social media, newsletters and briefings improving attendance at events by approximately 150%
Strategic Volunteerism
Assessing your Volunteer Contributions
Documenting your Volunteer Work
You should have already received the survey link for this session. We value your input! If you do not have the link, you can access it right away, all you have to do is log into JSS and go to Tools, Survey, and click on the session you need to take the survey on.
THERE IS NOT AN ASSESSEMENT UNTIL AFTER ALL SESSIONS ARE COMPLETED.
Once all the sessions have been presented you will be given the link to complete the assessment. You will have to be logged onto JSS to complete the assessment. Again, you can always access by logging onto JSS and go to Tools, Assessments and select the session for the assessment you need to take.
This is what your certificate will look like.
While in JSS – please remember to log you Volunteer Hours under Tools and then Volunteer Activity Tracker. These hours are collected by your states and the numbers are reported to NGB.
We always like to encourage everyone to continue the conversation by visiting the Community section of the JSS site. Here you can gain a wealth of information on anything Family Readiness. We post a thread for each webinar session where we invite your comments, ideas, suggestions, and questions.
We also post the presentations and handouts in the File Library under Volunteer Training.
Thank you for joining us this session. If you have any questions or concerns about the presentation, VTT or anything Family Readiness, you are always welcome to contact Judy Wolf the Volunteer Program Coordinator or Deanna Cole the Training Program Manager. They are always excited to hear from everyone and is there to support our National Guard Family Program Volunteers.