How many times in job interviews have you been asked about your experiences beyond work or education?

Long-term volunteering was part of my life since I was 15. When I eventually entered the workforce full-time, I realised how much value was created in the workplace based on the learnings and skills gained from these experiences. I wanted to know more from other people who’ve done volunteering to see if they share my opinion and explore how these experiences have shaped them. I reached out to friends, family and colleagues (from work and volunteering) and asked them: Do you think that your long-term volunteering experience has influenced the way you work? If so, how? How does that create value for your teams or organisation?

The immediate reaction to the first questions was “absolutely yes!” or “what a question - of course!”. No one out of 12 people stated the contrary. The second question was a bit more tricky to answer. Many said that they had thought about it a few times, but they wanted to take the time to reflect. So did I.

Here is the result of our joint reflection. Below, are the eight most common values, skills or competencies that can be gained while volunteering and that can add value in the workplace:

• Being autonomous and organised
  “Knowing that I had committed to volunteering on Saturdays and that people relied on me pushed me to be highly effective at organising my work, studying and scheduling leisure time. It allowed me to learn more about myself and when I’m best at being creative or at relaxing, which especially helped during the pandemic” – M.M.

• Practising deep listening, empathy and emotional intelligence:
  “Volunteering with children who lived in complicated family situations allowed me to tap in and develop a new type of listening skills. I learnt to listen deeply about their own realities, to understand the reason and causes that made them not have the brain space to do the homework or to even care about paying attention at school. My learning was to listen first, listen again, and try not to judge others” – S.G.

• Designing strategies that deliver value
  In volunteering experiences, financial rewards are usually never the end goal. Most of the time, they’re not even part of the equation. The purposes can range from achieving social justice to educating on specific sets of values. However, there are always clear strategic goals and well-defined indicators of success. Developing strategies for purposes that are not about selling more products or increasing revenue streams is crucial in order to be a meaningful actor in the face of the current global challenges we’re facing such as biodiversity loss or climate justice. For those who have worked on projects that aim to create value where the beneficiaries are the many rather than the few, it can be more natural and intuitive to always seek distributed and inclusive positive impact.

• Respecting resources
  Every mission requires teamwork and cross-entities work. It’s not only about managing people’s time and organisational resources but rather being respectful with these and thus with each other. “We were aware we could not achieve the change we want to see in the world on our own. Volunteering gave me the opportunity to learn about tools to use resources, such as time, respectfully, especially if it’s other people’s” – M.M.

• Putting solidarity at the centre
  “I learned that, sometimes, I will put in the bigger effort and other times my colleagues would help me. In the end, we all believed in the mission and were extremely aware of the impact of our work” – M.R.

• Practising aware leadership
  "I understood leadership as an enabler for others to thrive. For me, leadership was a way of seeding so the many, rather than the few privileged, can harvest the benefits. Similarly, volunteering made me more aware of my own privileges, which influenced my career decisions which means I now can use those privileges to create a positive impact on the environment and society” – L.J.

• Getting savvy with systems (Kate Raworth explains it perfectly in here)
  “Volunteering became a way to be in touch with different realities. It raised my own awareness of my privileges and how I could put my strengths and qualities at the service of others. It also became a way for me to better understand systems and the underlying causes and mindsets of the current models that rule our economy which impact our cultures, societies and the environment” – C.G.

• Creating reciprocal cultures
  “I worked with peasant communities where we worked on learning programmes, helped design and build dry toilets, refurbish schools… these were also spaces for sharing know-how. We built roofs based on local ecological knowledge (LEK) or hosted cooking workshops where we would cook traditional recipes with local ingredients” – C.G.

This is not a call for ex-volunteers to “bring your whole self to a job” especially if the work culture is underpinned by takers. But paid work (whether it’s in a company, government or third sector organisation) benefits from personal experiences, whether it is through volunteering or other life experience. This is why assessing people only on their paid work trajectory should be only partial and limited.

So to those who have the power to shape their teams: there’s a lot more in a person than the name of the university or the company they are coming from. Learning about people’s skills and competencies rather than where they achieved them is about asking different types of questions such as “could you share a couple of achievements you’re proud of? – they do not need to be work-related” or “what sort of values, behaviours or practises do you carry with you from non-work experiences?”

And to those of you who’ve volunteered: you might have been told your skills acquired in volunteering are less valid. Though there’s a systemic aspect to all of this, make sure you don't undermine yourself. Reflect on your personal past experiences outside of work that shaped your strengths and qualities – be conscious of what you bring and think how you can best communicate them.