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| Put Volunteer Work On Your Resume |
When you are looking for a job, your resume
gets your foot in the door. It represents you to a potential employer and you
want it to stand out from the resumes of the other applicants.
One way to capture the interest of an employer is
to show that you are an involved citizen -- someone who works to make the
community a better place to live. In other words, make sure your volunteer work
appears on your resume.
Sometimes your paid work history may not be as important as
what you have done as a volunteer in demonstrating that you have the necessary
job skills. One approach used by many people is to add a section to their
resumes called "Community Service" or "Volunteer Work." They list the
highlights of their volunteering here, to show that they have interests outside
of their employment history already described.
This is certainly better than ignoring
volunteer experience on a resume, but it is not the best way to highlight
what you have learned as a volunteer. Consider integrating your volunteer work
into the section of your resume called "Work Experience." Even if you were not
paid a salary and did not consider the volunteering to be "employment," it
certainly was productive work and should count as "experience."
Describe your
activities and achievements fully. You do not need to say these were done
as a volunteer, though you are of course welcome to do so.
If you feel uneasy about representing volunteer
work as equivalent to a full-time paid job, you can identify the volunteering
as being part-time. Be honest. Don't overstate what you did. But also be sure
to give yourself the credit you deserve.
If you are a student seeking your first real job,
being able to show volunteer work on a resume demonstrates that you had
interests beyond the classroom.
If you are returning to the paid work force
after some time away, your volunteer activities prove that you kept yourself
sharp and involved. If you want to change career fields, it may be your
volunteer work in the new field that tells a prospective employer you're worth
the risk, even if all your paid employment history is in some other field.
Be unapologetic about
giving space on your resume to volunteering. Since the whole goal of a resume
is to get you an interview, think how more interesting your face-to-face
conversation will be when you add all those community activities to show who
you really are. |
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