Volunteering - the skills I've gained, and what it's taught me

 

There are countless benefits to volunteering in your spare time. From an employability perspective, you develop crucial skills, gain experience that can enhance your CV and show employers you’re a well rounded individual. From a personal point of view, you are able to meet so many people from different walks of life, you can gain a sense of purpose and pride, it allows you the opportunity to support a cause you care about, and you give your time to support your local community. 

I have always looked favourably on volunteering, and it’s something I’ve tried to do since my days as a student in university. In 2015, I had firmly settled into my second year and I began volunteering as an online sales assistant with Oxfam, and a Rainbow leader with the local Rainbow’s group. At that time, I had no clue what I wanted to do career wise, and so I wasn’t volunteering with an aim of enhancing my CV, rather to find a meaningful way to fill my spare time. It’s not until now, six years later, I’ve seen that I can take things out of my time as a Rainbow’s leader to support my professional development. With an aim of pursuing a career within educational psychology, I am able to look back on my experience volunteering with Rainbow’s to pick out relevant skills and knowledge I gained, from working with children on a 1-1 and group basis, to communicating with parents and carrying out safeguarding procedures. And not only that, balancing my volunteering with my university work (and my part-time employment) enhanced my time-management and prioritisation skills. 

When the pandemic hit, and I was sent to work from home, I gained the time that I would have been commuting. With on-off restrictions, my social life (obviously) took a nosedive, so I was left with a whole lotta time on my hands that I could only fill with so much Netflix before I was itching for something more… Speaking to a colleague, I was made aware that a lot of companies were looking for online volunteers, and after some digging, I found a youth organisation who were looking for volunteer mentors/wellbeing champions. The organisation works to support young people aged 8-18 and their families, promoting wellbeing and focusing on early intervention. I applied for the role and after being interviewed and accepted, I looked forward to having something in my diary each Friday after work. In my time I have been volunteering with them, I have developed skills in presenting (sessions for the children and also a wellbeing webinar for parents), mentoring, improved my communication skills, gained experience supporting parents and families, and built some positive relationships with these young people to develop their skills and character. All of this adds to my relevant experience to help me on my way to becoming an ed psych, but most of all it’s been incredibly rewarding and I’ve loved it. 

Flexible and remote working opened a lot of doors, and I was able to balance my day-to-day to allow me to help out in my local community. I’ve been volunteering my evenings and weekends at the local vaccination clinics, which, it goes without saying, has been the best way to spend my time. The buzz that I’ve gotten from volunteering alongside other amazing volunteers and the nurses and doctors who have worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic has been unmatched. I’ve been close to tears each time - overwhelmed by the pure hope and joy that comes from seeing each vaccine given, bringing us one step closer to a post-covid world. Not only have I been part of what will become a HUGE and incredible moment in history, but I have developed and improved on so many skills, in communication, organisation and teamwork. 

I’ve also had the opportunity this year to support my local Foodbank, helping to pack up food parcels a couple of hours in the week for those who come in to use the service. Again, I’ve had the chance to volunteer alongside some wonderful people, including a man from Syria who came to the UK around 6 months ago; he now volunteers at the Foodbank after using the services only months ago himself. 

I've now begun a new role, and this has meant transitioning back to commuting/working in the office 5 days a week. My volunteering commitments have had to change, and am now only able to volunteer my Friday evenings and some weekends. But I will be forever grateful of the opportunities I've had this past year. 

What skills can you expect to gain from volunteering? 

Communication skills - particularly the skills to be adaptive in your communication depending on who you are talking to… I’ve had to develop my skills to allow me to communicate effectively with young people, people with English as a second language, those hard of hearing etc.,. 

Team working - Volunteering at 3 places at once alongside my full-time role, I had to quickly adapt to working in different teams of different sizes, each team I work in having a different role and aims. 

Prioritisation skills - Balancing my volunteering with flexible working, I’ve had to ensure that my responsibilities in work are not negatively impacted by my volunteering. This means managing my time and calendar to be able to meet my priorities in work and any other commitments or goals outside of work. 

Empathy - You may find yourself volunteering to support those less fortunate than yourself. Having the skills to volunteer with empathy means understanding and appreciating the difficulties that individuals can face and being able to relate well with people. 

Personal improvements including raising confidence and self-esteem - I’ve really increased my confidence this last year, doing things I never thought I’d be able to do (delivering a webinar for parents; supporting the vaccine rollout) and it’s given me a real boost in my self-esteem, knowing that I am making a difference, no matter how big or small. 

What can you learn from volunteering? 

Your skills and passions - as discussed, volunteering can help you develop many existing skills and help you learn new ones. These skills can help you progress personally and professionally, and can allow you to realise your passions. 

Where you want to go in your career -  I like to think that I am pretty set on my career goals now, but I’d be lying if I didn’t think, ‘ooo, I’d quite like to be a nurse’ after a shift at the vaccine centre. You just don’t know who you’ll meet or what you will learn about yourself, especially what you’re capable of or what you’re wanting to achieve. Keep open and flexible, and see where it takes you. 

Hidden talents - Never in a million years would I have thought I’d be able to deliver a webinar for parents on wellbeing, but I managed to bring all my skills and confidence gained to the table to give it my all, and I was sooo proud of myself. 

How to make a difference and improve the lives of others - For me, the best and most rewarding thing about volunteering is being able to make a difference. The CV booster is a nice plus, but it’s never been my main drive in volunteering. Especially after the year we have had, any way I can give my time to support our move to a post-covid world, and to support those who have been adversely affected by the pandemic, I will be willing to help. 

If you find yourself with spare time on your hands, explore what's available in your local community - whether face-to-face or online. You just don't know what you can learn about yourself or what doors it can open!

Read more on how volunteering can help you get a job in Lizzie Thomson’s Metro piece. 

The Best Podcasts for grads and twenty-somethings

 

I really fell in love with podcasts in Lockdown 1.0... I'd go on my lil daily allowed walk and pop one on and it was a fab escape from the world. Here are some of the best podcasts I've discovered that are brilliant for my fellow grads and twenty-somethings. They cover everything from delivering the lols, career advice, mental health and general life topics. 

Adulting with Oenone

"The podcast that's trying to figure out all of the things that we never got taught in school."

Suggested episodes: '#97 Selfishness, Communication & Taxes with Michelle Elman', 'Living Better with Alistair Campbell', and '#58 When Will We Be 'Successful'? with Louise Troen'.

How to Fail with Elizabeth Day 

"How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is a podcast that celebrates the things that haven’t gone right. Every week, a new interviewee explores what their failures taught them about how to succeed better."

Suggested episodes: Any! Everyone talks so openly and shares great advice. 

Things You Can’t Ask Yer Mum 

"Welcome to Things You Can't Ask Yer Mum. On this podcast we chat through some of those topics that you just can't ask your mum. There will be both tears and laughter as we answer questions from our followers and chat through our experiences of relationships, breakups, grief and friendships."

Suggested episodes: 'Comparison and working on yourself', 'Navigating Friendships', and 'S2 Ep 7 Money'. 

Owning It: The Anxiety Podcast 

"This practical and relaxed series explores everything from what anxiety is and why it happens to us, how our brains work and why it's actually very normal to the various tools and techniques necessary for owning it. Author Caroline Foran shares her story, along with some expert input, in an attempt to help you show your anxiety who's boss. Most importantly, this is a series that tackles the reality of anxiety from a refreshing and relatable perspective."

Suggested episodes: 'Owning It: Dissolving your career anxiety', 'Owning It: The power of decision making for anxiety', and 'Owning It: How to approach financial anxiety'. 

Life Hacks - Careers Toolkit 

"Vick Hope and Katie Thistleton bring you reassuring advice and guidance to help you navigate options for your career. They're joined by experts to help deal with your careers concerns; from first impressions to side hustles, job interviews to CVs."

Suggested episodes: 'What can I learn from work experience?', 'How can I impress when I start a new job?', and 'How can I ace my job interview?'

Good Influence with Gemma Styles 

"In each informative episode we meet a different guest, who’ll help us pay attention to something we should know about, but maybe don’t. Through relaxed, honest and relatable conversations, we learn together what these good influence guests have to teach us on topics from mental health to media representation, confidence to climate."

Suggested episodes: 'Dr Soph on managing emotions',  and 'Lucy Sheridan on Comparison'. 

Squiggly Careers

"Want to have a happy career and love your job but not sure where to start? The Amazing If podcast brings you practical, action focused advice on how to take control of your career and make better choices about your future. Full of tips, tools and techniques that you can put into practice straight away."

Suggested episodes: 'A Fear Of Being Found Out', 'A Fear Of Not Knowing Enough', 'A Fear of Being Too Young',  'A Fear of Failing' and '#170 Exploring and applying for a new job'. 

The Last 3 Digits 

"A weekly Podcast from Nego True, Bola Sol and Disunomics talking money & everything in between."

Suggested episodes: 'Is Financial Jealousy a thing?', 'Paying rent to parents, Rental or home or Rolex?! and online buying', and 'Can MONEY buy HAPPINESS?'

The Cut 

"The Cut is a weekly audio magazine exploring culture, style, sex, politics and more. Each week, an ensemble of voices, led by host Avery Trufelman, engages in the conversations that matter most in our current moment. Intimate, provocative, and probing, the Cut aims to ask questions before listeners even know they have them, always with a generous wit and an expansive idea of what is possible."

Suggested episodes: 'Would You Move Back Home? Could You?', 'You're Hired', 'You Should Probably Quit', 

My Dad Wrote a Porno 

"Imagine if your Dad wrote a dirty book. Most people would try to ignore it and pretend it had never happened - but not Jamie Morton. Instead, he's decided to read it to the world in this award-winning comedy podcast. With the help of his friends, James Cooper and BBC Radio 1's Alice Levine, Jamie reads a chapter a week and discovers more about his father than he ever bargained for." 

Suggested episodes: All of them, they are HILARIOUS 

A new One Oh One

Picture this: It’s 2017, I’m a few months away from graduating with my undergraduate degree in psychology, and naturally (/obviously!), I’m having an existential crisis. What happens next? The question on my mind, and what Clare Dykchoff had found a question on many graduates’ minds in her 2013 Independent article, ‘Graduate blues: Why we need to talk about post-university depression’. I had read Clare’s article one morning when walking to my 9am lecture, on a quest to figure out if other people were dreading leaving university just as much as I was. I had done as much as I could to reduce the uncertainty I faced. I lined up a publishing internship, a part-time job at a coffee shop, and decided to move back home to save some money. But I still could not shake that sense of dread, because I felt a weight of expectations above me, from myself, and the wider society. Despite the fact I hadn’t yet tentatively thrown my cap in the air (because if you lose the rented cap, you’re buggered), I was definitely feeling the blues and I worried it was only going to get worse. Clare’s article had really lit a spark in me, and so when it came to choosing my topic for my MRes degree, I decided to explore the transition out of university, with it being such an under-researched area in academia at the time. 

I really loved conducting that research. I loved speaking to graduates about their experiences of leaving education behind and taking a jump into a world outside of the bubble we had come to know and take comfort from. More than anything, I loved how it made me feel less alone. Though I worked hard to not inject my own personal experiences into my research (cos BPS guidelines), I couldn’t help but feel some reassurance when a participant would disclose feeling a way I had felt, or had the same worries, or faced the same challenges as I had.  I wanted to take my research further, and I wanted other graduates to feel that same sense of, ‘okay, I’m not alone in this…’ and so in 2019, once I had finalised my thesis, One Oh One was born. 

When I first graduated in 2017, the world was a totally different place… And again, when I started One Oh One in 2019, we look back to that time now, in the middle of the ongoing pandemic, and see a world that is so unrecognisable to the one we live in currently. And all of this change has made me hesitant to put the spotlight on this project I set up and I took a little back step. Because there has been so much change since I first graduated, and even more so since 2019. I worried that I would not be able to offer the support that some recent graduates may need, because I couldn’t begin to understand the difficulties that 2020/21 graduates are facing as a result of the pandemic, I couldn’t imagine how challenging it must be to graduate in these times, with so much more uncertainty looming than I ever had to face. Coupled with the fact I’ve just recently turned 25, I worried that I was no longer #relatable, but the fact is, I am still struggling, even so many years on from graduating, to find my place in the world (inclusive of the working world). And I know so many others are, too. 

And I miss writing, I miss connecting, I miss sharing your stories. So I will be picking up the metaphorical pen, and going ahead with a new One Oh One. This space will still be for graduates, and I will still continue to share my experiences and research, your stories, your work… But as a running theme, I want to move to a focus on your 20s in general. Regardless of whether you hold letters behind your name, your 20s are T O U G H.  One Oh One will become a space to acknowledge this. So, watch this space. 

Things I've learnt since graduating, and what I wish I knew before!

For those of you who don’t already know, my name is Rebecca and I am the creator of One Oh One - a project I started when I finished my postgraduate research into the transition out of university. I graduated with my BSc in 2017 and have been in the working world since then (balancing full-time work with my postgraduate research degree was not fun!). 

I’ve learnt a lot during my time in the ‘real’ world. It’s been a joy and an absolute nightmare at the same time. I’ve developed my skills, I’ve grown in confidence, and I’d like to share with you some of the things I’ve come to learn. In life, we always wish we could act on our hindsight and go back to tweak things - perhaps things we wouldn’t have said, or would have said… opportunities we would have taken. If I had the chance to go back and visit 21-year-old me, here’s what I would tell her (and I’m hoping this advice might be helpful for you, too!)

1) You won’t suddenly know what you want to do once you graduate, and that’s okay. Or you might have an idea and then some time later you’ll want to do something else. And whilst that uncertainty may be difficult for you to sit with, realise that it’s okay. Plans change, and you change, too. This is especially important if you realise you don’t want to go into a degree-related career. 

2) And on that note, you don’t need to have a five year plan - or, do have a plan but realise it may not follow through, because things can blindside you and throw it up in the air (ahem, covid-19). 

3) So for that reason, stay flexible. Don’t get caught up if you’re not in the job you want to be in right now. Keep an open mind, and keep putting feelers out. Don’t just wait for places to post vacancies, if you’re interested in working somewhere, reach out and try your luck, and if nothing comes from it, at least you have the experience of networking. 

4) Try not to take rejection personally. It’s a really tough world out here, and we’re no longer competing with just our peers, but with so many people with wide experiences and diverse backgrounds. If you are rejected from a job, can you ask for feedback?

5) And you have to take it easy on yourself. Please do try as hard as you can to not  compare yourself to others and your own expectations of where you thought you’d be/would like to have been. 

6) However, we’re all human, and you will compare yourself to others, and there will be jealousy, or anxiety that you’re not ‘there’ but you have to trust that you are doing just fine at your own pace.

7) It can be difficult to maintain friendships in the working world, but it’s not impossible. Try and plan things with your friends, even if it’s a 30 minute coffee meet up (or Zoom call). 

8) One day you’ll love your job, the next you’ll hate it. Never make brash decisions.

 

9) People are going to love asking you what you plan to do next, don’t be freaked out by that question, it’s okay to say you don’t know. 

10) And finally, you’re never on your own! I can guarantee you, most of your graduate friends have felt completely and totally out of their depths at times… even the ones who look like they’ve got it under control. 

Guest post: Surviving post-graduation blues

 

Eleanor graduated last year from Sheffield Hallam University with a degree in English Language. As we can expect, graduating in the middle of a global pandemic can make the already daunting move out of education seem even more overwhelming. In this guest post, Eleanor talks about her experience dealing with those 'post-graduation blues' that so many of us face and talks us through what she has learnt so far, in the hopes that it can make graduates feeling the same way, less alone.

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Finishing university can be completely overwhelming, let alone during a global pandemic. My second semester of third year was probably the most stressful time of my life. I had constant deadlines to meet, an 8,000-word dissertation to write whilst trying to cope with the pressure of achieving my best mark. How would I be defined if I didn’t get the grade I wanted? These thoughts never left my mind. 

In March 2020, COVID-19 began to impact many people’s lives and it suddenly hit me that I had to return home for lockdown and leave university, three months earlier than I had planned. I didn’t get the chance to say bye to all my friends or thank my lecturers for all their help with my work over the past three years. It was extremely hard finishing my dissertation and all my other assignments at home, there were so many distractions, and I missed being at the library where I felt like I could be the most productive. 

The day finally came when I submitted my last assignment. Although I was completely over the moon that I had finished all my work, it still felt bittersweet. I wasn’t 100% happy because I had no idea what my next steps were, I didn’t know what career I wanted to go in and I genuinely didn’t know what my purpose was after the best years of my life were over so quickly. Whilst feeling like this, all I wanted to do was go back to Sheffield and celebrate finishing university by going on a night out with all my friends. Obviously, this couldn’t happen, and it was the worst feeling ever because I felt like my achievements and success didn’t mean anything. 

I really struggled with moving back home. The independence I gained when living on my own at university and becoming an adult felt like it completely disappeared, and it was almost as if my life had gone completely backwards. I was constantly comparing myself to other people on social media who had secured a graduate job and I felt like a failure because I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I had to deal with the constant overpowering questions ‘So, what do you want to do now?’ or ‘When are you going to get a proper job?’. My mental health really took a turn for the worst because I couldn’t stop thinking about the future and all the uncertainty that came with it. 

It took me several months when I finally realised, why am I actually stressing out so much? Just because the job I have now isn’t what I want to be doing forever and I haven’t exactly figured out what my next steps are, this IS okay. I’m only 22 years old and I definitely don’t need to have my whole life planned out. Not to forget the fact that we’re currently living in unprecedented times and finding a job is more difficult than ever, which is why putting unnecessary amounts of pressure on myself isn’t healthy. 

I wanted to write this blog to make sure that other graduates who may also be feeling like this know that they’re not alone. There is so much support at university when you’re a student, but as soon as you leave you can feel completely isolated and not part of a community anymore. Even though COVID-19 has made this difficult, it’s important to stay in touch with your friends from university who may be struggling with this transition too, and reach out for support if you need it. I’ve tried to overcome my post-university blues by keeping busy, taking regular breaks from social media so I’m not constantly looking at what other people are doing, and making sure that I’m patient. If like me, you’re not set on what you want to do, try and see this as something positive! You have time to travel, volunteer, or even work abroad for some time if you want to experience a different culture and gain some experience. Remember that you’re still young and it’s better to give yourself time to think about what you want to do, rather than committing to a job that you might hate and end up regretting rushing into it.