I have taken on several voluntary roles over the past 10-11 years, sometimes to get a feel for certain roles but mostly as a way of developing my skills & expanding my professional knowledge. My voluntary roles have included acting as Student Mentor at university, acting as founder/advocate for the LGBT Community project & becoming a strategic driver for the NMSI Diversity Panel Entrypoints Taskforce.
I've also worked on fundraising projects for charities such as the RNIB, Swindon Foggys & others.
I think that volunteering as a professional activity has a lot of benefits at any point of your career. It can help you build up a database of professional & transferable skills which can help you to expand your CV, get a library position, network & build up your professional knowledge. In addition to professional support volunteering can also help you to build confidence & social skills. Volunteering can also offer opportunities for building a professional portfolio & gaining experience in public speaking, as well as research & publication opportunities.
My initial voluntary positions were based on gaining work experience while at university & gaining transferrable skills to keep my CV current & marketable. As a student I was also able to use volunteer roles to test out specific career areas without tying yourself fully into that career path. In my case, during my undergraduate degree I was considering opportunities for working in libraries or as a teacher. Both these roles would involve utilising transferrable skills like customer services, as well as specific skills like public speaking & teaching. As a result I took on the role of Student Mentor. This gave me the opportunity to practice negotiation & liaison, communication & organisation skills. This mentoring role was a good basis for me to build on & use to market myself in the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) market.
Once I became more involved in libraries as a profession through my ILM Master of Research, & particularly after getting my job at SMLA, I began looking into more specific ways of volunteering. In particular I was looking for volunteer roles that would benefit the library service as well as my professional development because I believe that although taking the volunteer service to extremes could be detrimental to the library service as a whole (resulting in loss of qualified staff or cuts in services because by definition volunteers won't be there every day 9-5 & all year round), having a balanced volunteer service that supports existing & qualified staff & is able to relieve some of the pressure on them will allow libraries to focus their time & attention on areas of the service that can only be developed by someone with the proper qualifications, & who is available on a regular daily basis. Suggesting that a volunteer can take on any & all aspects of the librarians role does de-value our profession, & is frankly ridiculous, for one thing most volunteers working in their own paid positions so that they wouldn't be able to cover the service & keep it open in the same way actual employees can but with the best will in the world they wouldn't be able to keep it to the same standards either. I am not knocking volunteers AT ALL - they are absolutely brilliant & we couldn't do without them being their to support us & they can bring a wide range of transferrable skills from their other jobs to the service, but unless their other jobs is in some other library service they wouldn't have the necessary professional skills to follow through in all areas (such as cataloguing) or being able to take on the role of the strategic planner without the serviuce investing in a lot of training for them (with no guarantees about how long they'll be in the service for, how committed they are to developing themselves as librarians or anything else).
I was given the opportunity to volunteer within the NMSI organisation by our professional development & recruitment teams &, as a result of looking at how volunteers could support the library profession & the need for volunteers with service specific skills, I decided to become involved with volunteering for several NMSI strategic panels including acting as a SMEG (Science Museum Executive Group) Observer & then later taking on the role of strategic driver for the NMSI Diversity Panel Entrypoints Taskforce (EPT). These roles gave me the opportunity to learn more about strategy & leadership in the library service while acting as an advocate for different elements of the library audience & stakeholders groups, & contributing to how national policy is set, interpreted & implemented. As part of the EPT role in particular I had the opportunity to feedback to our library service, & hopefully to the wider ILM community, by creating service packs & policies to be circulated thoughout all the NMSI arms.
I also wanted to find the opportunity to have a more direct affect on national policy & procedures for public libraries, whether it involved shaping how they are implemented at a local level or how they are designed at a national level, so I began looking into opportunities in the wider ILM community & looking at what skills or experience I could bring to them. At this point I had already begun volunteering with the local LGBT Community project campaign - the aim of which is to create an 'alternative scene' & offer support to the LGBT community. As part of this community role I made contact with the local council through the LGBT Coalition & the Disability Coalition (later joined together as part of the Single Equality Coalition) & was put in contact with one of the strategic managers for the local libraries who was trying to improve LGBT services in the library. I felt this was something that would enable me to join together the three strands of my professional skills, community skills, & optimising my role as a volunteer to gain the most benefit from it. Being involved in the LGBT in Libraries project not only benefits the local public libraries, it also benefits our LGBT Community project as a whole & allows us to have some say in policy & procedures relating to our services, on the personal side it also allows me to develop a new range of professional skills which in turn helps me to improve the services of our individual library organisation.
Recently I've also had the opportunity to look at volunteering from a new angle as part of my paid employment, I have been given the role of Volunteer Supervisor for our trade literature volunteers (who are worth their weight in gold for all the work they've done on the project so far). Part of my role involved liasing with the NMSI volunteer team to actually generate the role descriptions for the trade lit. volunteers, which is where I found out that the organisation has policies in place to protect the volunteers, the service & the paid employees by maintaining the balance bewteen voluntary roles & paid roles. For instance, a volunteers role description is not allowed to include tasks that should be covered by the job description of a paid employee, & which they could reasonably be expected to carry out. on their own. So in our case we are allowed to include indexing/listing the trade lit. in our volunteer roles because there are a few hundred boxes holding several thousand unsorted pieces of trade lit. & there is no way they could expect an paid employee to work their way through that (unles they had been taken on solely for that purpose & were not involved in any other tasks or projects). On the other hand, as project leader it's part of my job description to do the strategic planning for the project so I wouldn't be able to ask the volunteers to do any of the research, or any of the development or marketing tasks. I think this may be the best model of volunteering vs. employment roles, it allows for support from both sides but makes sure the roles are clearly defined so that the volunteers don't have to worry they're being overburdened or given something to do outside their skillset, & the employees don't feel as if their roles are being taken over.
I'd love to hear if anyone else has any experience of different formats for volunteering/employee programmes & how they worked out, or if there's any suggestions for other places to find volunteer experiences beyond asking your university office, your local council or your employer's HR/training departments.
I've also worked on fundraising projects for charities such as the RNIB, Swindon Foggys & others.
I think that volunteering as a professional activity has a lot of benefits at any point of your career. It can help you build up a database of professional & transferable skills which can help you to expand your CV, get a library position, network & build up your professional knowledge. In addition to professional support volunteering can also help you to build confidence & social skills. Volunteering can also offer opportunities for building a professional portfolio & gaining experience in public speaking, as well as research & publication opportunities.
My initial voluntary positions were based on gaining work experience while at university & gaining transferrable skills to keep my CV current & marketable. As a student I was also able to use volunteer roles to test out specific career areas without tying yourself fully into that career path. In my case, during my undergraduate degree I was considering opportunities for working in libraries or as a teacher. Both these roles would involve utilising transferrable skills like customer services, as well as specific skills like public speaking & teaching. As a result I took on the role of Student Mentor. This gave me the opportunity to practice negotiation & liaison, communication & organisation skills. This mentoring role was a good basis for me to build on & use to market myself in the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) market.
Once I became more involved in libraries as a profession through my ILM Master of Research, & particularly after getting my job at SMLA, I began looking into more specific ways of volunteering. In particular I was looking for volunteer roles that would benefit the library service as well as my professional development because I believe that although taking the volunteer service to extremes could be detrimental to the library service as a whole (resulting in loss of qualified staff or cuts in services because by definition volunteers won't be there every day 9-5 & all year round), having a balanced volunteer service that supports existing & qualified staff & is able to relieve some of the pressure on them will allow libraries to focus their time & attention on areas of the service that can only be developed by someone with the proper qualifications, & who is available on a regular daily basis. Suggesting that a volunteer can take on any & all aspects of the librarians role does de-value our profession, & is frankly ridiculous, for one thing most volunteers working in their own paid positions so that they wouldn't be able to cover the service & keep it open in the same way actual employees can but with the best will in the world they wouldn't be able to keep it to the same standards either. I am not knocking volunteers AT ALL - they are absolutely brilliant & we couldn't do without them being their to support us & they can bring a wide range of transferrable skills from their other jobs to the service, but unless their other jobs is in some other library service they wouldn't have the necessary professional skills to follow through in all areas (such as cataloguing) or being able to take on the role of the strategic planner without the serviuce investing in a lot of training for them (with no guarantees about how long they'll be in the service for, how committed they are to developing themselves as librarians or anything else).
I was given the opportunity to volunteer within the NMSI organisation by our professional development & recruitment teams &, as a result of looking at how volunteers could support the library profession & the need for volunteers with service specific skills, I decided to become involved with volunteering for several NMSI strategic panels including acting as a SMEG (Science Museum Executive Group) Observer & then later taking on the role of strategic driver for the NMSI Diversity Panel Entrypoints Taskforce (EPT). These roles gave me the opportunity to learn more about strategy & leadership in the library service while acting as an advocate for different elements of the library audience & stakeholders groups, & contributing to how national policy is set, interpreted & implemented. As part of the EPT role in particular I had the opportunity to feedback to our library service, & hopefully to the wider ILM community, by creating service packs & policies to be circulated thoughout all the NMSI arms.
I also wanted to find the opportunity to have a more direct affect on national policy & procedures for public libraries, whether it involved shaping how they are implemented at a local level or how they are designed at a national level, so I began looking into opportunities in the wider ILM community & looking at what skills or experience I could bring to them. At this point I had already begun volunteering with the local LGBT Community project campaign - the aim of which is to create an 'alternative scene' & offer support to the LGBT community. As part of this community role I made contact with the local council through the LGBT Coalition & the Disability Coalition (later joined together as part of the Single Equality Coalition) & was put in contact with one of the strategic managers for the local libraries who was trying to improve LGBT services in the library. I felt this was something that would enable me to join together the three strands of my professional skills, community skills, & optimising my role as a volunteer to gain the most benefit from it. Being involved in the LGBT in Libraries project not only benefits the local public libraries, it also benefits our LGBT Community project as a whole & allows us to have some say in policy & procedures relating to our services, on the personal side it also allows me to develop a new range of professional skills which in turn helps me to improve the services of our individual library organisation.
Recently I've also had the opportunity to look at volunteering from a new angle as part of my paid employment, I have been given the role of Volunteer Supervisor for our trade literature volunteers (who are worth their weight in gold for all the work they've done on the project so far). Part of my role involved liasing with the NMSI volunteer team to actually generate the role descriptions for the trade lit. volunteers, which is where I found out that the organisation has policies in place to protect the volunteers, the service & the paid employees by maintaining the balance bewteen voluntary roles & paid roles. For instance, a volunteers role description is not allowed to include tasks that should be covered by the job description of a paid employee, & which they could reasonably be expected to carry out. on their own. So in our case we are allowed to include indexing/listing the trade lit. in our volunteer roles because there are a few hundred boxes holding several thousand unsorted pieces of trade lit. & there is no way they could expect an paid employee to work their way through that (unles they had been taken on solely for that purpose & were not involved in any other tasks or projects). On the other hand, as project leader it's part of my job description to do the strategic planning for the project so I wouldn't be able to ask the volunteers to do any of the research, or any of the development or marketing tasks. I think this may be the best model of volunteering vs. employment roles, it allows for support from both sides but makes sure the roles are clearly defined so that the volunteers don't have to worry they're being overburdened or given something to do outside their skillset, & the employees don't feel as if their roles are being taken over.
I'd love to hear if anyone else has any experience of different formats for volunteering/employee programmes & how they worked out, or if there's any suggestions for other places to find volunteer experiences beyond asking your university office, your local council or your employer's HR/training departments.
No comments:
Post a Comment