Utilising volunteering and internships to boost your CV

When applying for a new job, you can leverage transferable skills gained from developmental opportunities like volunteering, internships, or part-time roles. By highlighting how these skills apply to the job you’re aiming for, you can show employers you’re ready to succeed in the role.

Finding volunteering and internship opportunities

The Prospects Early Careers Survey found that 42% of students and graduates had a part-time job, 30% had volunteering experience and only 20% had no work experience at all. If you’re part of that 20% then don’t worry, there’s lots of places you can go to in order to boost your skillset and polish your CV. It can be overwhelming looking through job website specifically to find internship and volunteering opportunities, but here are some websites you can use that are specifically for these purposes.

Internships

• Prospects
• StudentJob
• Gov.uk

Volunteering

• National Association for Voluntary and Community Action
• National Council for Voluntary Organisation
• Volunteering Matters
• Reach Volunteering
• NHS Volunteering

You can filter opportunities by location, type of organisation, and even salary.

Why should you undertake an internship or volunteering, you might ask? Not only do they give you valuable experience to put on your CV, but they can also help to give back to the community. By volunteering, you’ll be able to meet new people, understand new businesses or charities, and do something good! With internships, you’ll typically spend a short amount of time integrating into a business, where you can bring in fresh ideas and get to understand how business works. These can help you decide the type of career you might go into, as well as enhance your CV with vital experience that employers are looking for!

Online opportunities

If you’re unable to relocate for an internship, or want to gain experience from your own home, you could consider online opportunities, such as virtual internships or online courses. Virtual internships are short-term work experience placements and are great ways to interact with different organisations, understand how businesses work, and upskill yourself without leaving the house! You’ll communicate with your employer through things like webinars, emails and virtual meetings, and usually be tasked with working on a project the organisation has set for you. Virtual internships can vary in length, from a few days to a few months, depending on the vacancy and the organisation you’re doing the internship with. You can check out Barclays Life Skills, Forage and Bright Network for opportunities.

There are lots of online courses you could take to further develop your skills – such as this one! Websites such as FutureLearn, Coursera and Open Learn offer lots of (free!) short courses on a range of different subjects which may be related to your degree that you might want to learn more about. There are also lots of courses on other kinds of transferable skills, as well as courses on new knowledge and activities you might be interested in. Lots of people have embarked on coding or marketing courses which are unrelated to their degrees, and then found a role in those fields! The possibilities for learning online are endless.

How to enhance your CV with experience

You might find it difficult to meet competencies employers are looking for in your CV if you don’t have ‘the right experience’. What you can do, is when you have opportunities or experiences in your life is to create and fill in a diary explaining what you’ve done in your time there, and reflect at the end, outlining key things that you’ve worked on that relate to difference competencies. You can then pick these out and put them into your CV as evidence of you developing and using skills that the employer is looking for. There are a few main ways you can outline your experiences in your CV – either start off with a competency or skill you’ve developed through your experience and link your experience directly to that. Or you can outline the role you had and explain the key skills you gained. For example, if you wanted to demonstrate your ability to manage time, you might write something like this:

Time management

During my time as volunteer administrator for a charity, I oversaw organising the year’s meeting schedule, ensuring that most, if not all, members of the team are available for every date. I also ensured that previous meeting minutes, agendas and accompanying documents were distributed one week before each meeting.

Volunteer administrator, Charity X: January – December 2023

• Responsible for organising all year’s meetings, ensuring all members available for each meeting
• Collated all agendas, accompanying documents and previous meeting minutes for distribution one week before upcoming meeting

It’s totally up to you which way you decide to put it in your CV, but it’s an easy way to show off your skills with relevant experience!