Back in 2012 and 2013, I was part of the ICT4EMPL Future Work project, focused on the countries of the European Union and funded by the European Commission. The overall project aimed to inform policy regarding “new forms of work” and pathways to employability that involved online technologies. The overall ICT4EMPL project produced a series of reports on the state of play of novel forms of internet-mediated work activity: crowd-sourced labour, crowdfunding, and internet-mediated work exchange (timebanks and complementary currency) and, of course, internet-mediated volunteering (virtual volunteering).

For this project, I got to research and map the prevalence of virtual volunteering in Europe and explore how virtual volunteering could support people’s employability: Here my complete final paper. And here is the Wiki I created for the project.

Included in this paper was Chapter 4, Internet-mediated volunteering and employability. I’ve reproduced the text from Chapter 4 on the web so that it’s more findable.

Traditional volunteering – onsite, face-to-face – has been a good source for people to acquire or enhance new skills, explore careers and network with others all towards improving their employability. As the paper notes, along with enhancing technical skills and subject knowledge, employers also want other skills, many of which can be acquired through virtual volunteering:

• Communication and interpersonal skills,
• Problem-solving skills,
• Using your initiative and being self-motivated,
• Working under pressure and to deadlines,
• Organizational skills,
• Team working,
• Ability to learn and adapt,
• Numeracy,
• Valuing diversity and difference

This chapter of my paper looks at how virtual volunteering can help to enhance those skills, as well as challenges and risk in promoting online volunteering as a route to employability.

If your agency or organization is considering virtual volunteering as a path to helping people become more employable, check out the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement. The book can help you fully explore the reality of remote volunteer engagement and what you and partner organizations will need to put in place, in terms of policy and procedures, to ensure success. This book was helpful long before the global pandemic spurred so many organizations to, at last, embrace virtual volunteering. This is the most comprehensive resource anywhere on working with online volunteers, and on using the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including those you might not think of as “online” volunteers.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.