October Pro RoundUp: Invest In Yourself with Professional Volunteer Resources

Amid a fluctuating and sometimes volatile world economy, challenging job and housing markets, and the uncharted waters of a post-pandemic new normal, I’m living proof of the wise adage to “invest in yourself to get the best interest.”

Before joining the VolPro team, my career trajectory included some unexpected bumps and (ultimately rewarding) detours, and they all started with my decision to bet on myself and my future.

In this month’s Pro Roundup, I’ll share some of my adventures as well as professional volunteer resources to help you take the next step to invest in yourself, too!

Worth It! Professional Volunteer Resources for Ongoing Education

If I’ve learned anything in the last few years, it’s how quickly things can change without notice. Like many others around the world, the volunteer department I was working in disappeared overnight at the start of the pandemic. And while I am very thankful that I was reassigned instead of furloughed, I definitely felt the uncertainty of my future in those early dark days.

It was a wake-up call to me on the importance of continuing to build my job skills to remain “essential” as a valuable and contributing team member, and I decided pretty quickly that it was time to go back to school and seek out professional volunteer resources to level up my certifications.

I confess that at the start of my classes, I wasn’t sure how much value I was going to receive beyond the validation of some fancy letters after my name on my business card. After all, I’d been managing volunteers for years…what more could I possibly learn in a classroom setting that I hadn’t already earned in the field?

I was very surprised to learn the answer to that question was A LOT! Things that I had struggled and stumbled to piece together over years were covered in just a semester with super knowledgeable instructors who could make complex content simple to understand.

I had definitely underestimated the level of professional experience my instructors would have, as well as their own real-world lived experience in the content they were teaching. I was overjoyed to learn things on a Tuesday night that I could immediately apply at work the very next day. And at least once per class, I thought, “I wish I’d known this before now!” or, “This would have been so helpful when I first started!”

So much more than just the diploma, the certification letters, or becoming more hire-able, my return to school was a practical skill and competency boost, and it turns out that there was still a whole lot to learn once I decided to invest in myself and my future.

This is also something I hear a lot from members in the VolunteerPro Community and students in our Volunteer Management Fundamentals Certificate course: “I wish I’d joined years ago,” or “This course is so helpful!”

I have experienced the value these professional courses provide, both in skill-building and in time management (since you don’t waste time figuring out how to re-invent a wheel someone’s already designed), and so have our students. And it’s just one more reason that I’m absolutely passionate about seeking out ongoing education and development with professional volunteer resources.

The Volunteer Management Fundamentals Certificate Course is an especially great professional volunteer resource for quick-win skill building. This focused five-week course is designed to help leaders of volunteers learn and build the essential frameworks – the “fundamentals” – for a successful volunteer program in just over a month.

From ethics and appreciation to recruitment and retention, this course is a “must” for every volunteer leader…even the ones like me who feel like they don’t need it and who might be surprised at all they learn!

Another great professional volunteer resource for skill-building is the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration (CCVA). Like many, I didn’t purposely set out to become a volunteer professional and didn’t know that it could be a lifelong career with professional advancement and levels of certification.

I was surprised and delighted a few years in to discover that it was a viable career path…and I’m just competitive enough that once I knew I could pursue certification credentials, it immediately became my next goal! Seeing the CVA (“Certified in Volunteer Administration”) after a volunteer professional’s name is an immediate indicator that the person has invested the necessary time and effort to develop their skills and expertise in volunteer management, and it is also a definite boost as a talking point during job interviews.

For more tips on what skills to include on your resume, download this free Volunteer Coordinator Job Description Template>>

Another professional resource for volunteer leaders to stay informed about best practices is the Engage Journal. This online journal offers monthly articles on today’s most pressing volunteer issues and ethics as well as scholarly articles and research papers on volunteerism and volunteer market trends. The journal’s subscription includes access to its full archive which includes years of articles and studies all in one place, which would be worth the investment all by itself!

Subscribers to the Journal can check out an article Tobi wrote, Working with Human Nature, Not Against It: Using Brain Science to Boost Volunteer Engagement>>

Professional Volunteer Resources for Community and Idea Sharing

Let’s be honest…coordinating volunteers can sometimes be a lonely job. On one hand, you may spend whole days checking in with volunteers, going to meetings, and ‘extroverting” with others about various things. But volunteer departments are often small, maybe just a “team of one,” and usually fit in the cracks somewhere between other departments like human resources or marketing.

When it comes to collaboration on ideas, or just sharing thoughts on the program, volunteer leaders can feel a little isolated. When I was starting out, I intentionally tried to build a community of fellow volunteer coordinators by cold-calling all the agencies in town to introduce myself and open the lines of communication. It was a somewhat successful effort, and everyone was gracious and happy to collaborate, but we were all too busy in the day-to-day of our programs to really make it work.

My efforts did result in one big win, though. A veteran volunteer coordinator from the local museum told me about VolunteerPro’s membership and recommended it as a great resource to connect with other volunteer professionals and access ongoing training tools.

The VolunteerPro Membership Community was exactly what I was seeking…a collaborative group of like-minded professionals who loved working with volunteers and wanted to provide the most excellent service possible for them, along with a vast library of professional volunteer resources and live training content from an industry expert who had already traveled the path I was starting on. It delivered the results I was trying to cobble together on my own, and membership was totally worth the investment I decided to make in myself to build a professional community and learn new things.

Another great community specifically for volunteer executives and board members can be found within the Nonprofit Leadership Lab. The lab, founded by Joan Garry out of her own experiences in those roles, provides specific resources for this often-overlooked subset of volunteers whose unique responsibilities include fundraising and board governance.

Tobi has worked with the Lab as a course contributor for years, so here at VolPro we know firsthand the quality of the content it offers. The Lab does great work and has a ton of resources for nonprofit boards. (Disclosure: VolunteerPro may make a commission on some of the resources offered by The Lab, but no worries! They will never include a markup, and we recommend these professional volunteer resources because they’re AWESOME and totally worth the investment!)

Professional Volunteer Resources – Return on Your Investment

Does working with volunteers make leaders more self-sacrificing, or are self-sacrificing people drawn to working with volunteers…which came first, the chicken or the egg?! Regardless of the reasons behind it, I have found that the volunteer engagement sector is filled with some of the kindest, most generous, hardest working people in the whole world.

And I’m here to tell you, all you wonderful, amazing volunteer engagement professionals, that you are also worth the time, effort, and investment that you are putting into your volunteers. In fact, the more you invest in yourself and your professional development, the more skill and knowledge you will have at your disposal to deposit back into your program.  It’s a rewarding cycle that guarantees a return on investment every single time.