Linking Feedback to Volunteering Skills

At the same time as gathering feedback on your volunteering activity, you will also be gathering feedback on how you can improve as a volunteer. You may wish to think about presentation, communication, and organisational skills, for example. Whilst you might not have identified the volunteering skills you intend to develop on an activity plan, these will have formed part of your personal objectives for an activity.

Earlier in the ExpertTrack, we asked you to complete your Development Goals to work out what your personal objectives are. This task involved prioritising seven types of skills that you wished to focus on developing during your volunteering.

• Communication skills
• Facilitator skills
• Mentoring skills
• Organisational skills
• Presentation skills
• Team working skills
• Improve confidence

By identifying objectives, you can try to gather feedback to help you improve these skills.

Personal and Professional Objectives

Watch the video above to hear from a couple of STEM Ambassadors about their personal and professional reasons and what motivates them to undertake volunteering activities. You will also hear from a director of a company and the type of skills he feels STEM Ambassadors develop. How do these relate to your own personal objectives?

Task

Revisit the Development Goals you set for your volunteering, or use the list above as a prompt.

What skills do you wish to focus your development on, and in turn gather feedback to help you do this? Capture your thinking by posting to the comments below.

Now take a look again at your activity planning document and the section on Focus of Feedback. In the space provided for feedback on yourself, note what you might do during your volunteering to gather feedback about your skills development.

Remember that your activity planning template will form part of your ExpertTrack Portfolio, so keep it safe and updated.