Advancing Through Volunteering

by Fei Min Lorente, Volunteer Manager

If you've cruised the job bank lately, you might have noticed a new option to "View Volunteer Jobs". We have been informing volunteer organizations in the area that we, as a professional community, are available to lend our skills to their organizations. They can post volunteer positions in our job bank the same way that other employers do. Then, when you're looking for something to do with your "spare time", you can "View Volunteer Jobs" and pick one.

Who has any spare time?!

Well, think of this as professional development. You can gain experience as a technical communicator and add items to your portfolio, either in your field of expertise or in a field you want to develop. Besides the actual technical work, you can learn about interviewing skills, working relationships, organizational skills and even management skills. It increases your networking opportunities. Moreover, you are doing your profession a service by boosting the status of technical communicators, and you are making a difference in your community. With volunteer work, you also have the freedom to choose an activity that fits into your available time and schedule. The job descriptions should give you an idea of the time commitment involved, and often you can do the work by "telecommuting" and using "flex time".

Why do volunteer organizations need technical communicators?

In short, they need people who can research, analyze, evaluate, organize and present information in a coherent fashion. That's us! These skills can be used to write proposals for grants, newspaper ads for fundraisers, newsletters, and letters appealing for donations. From the historical material I've inherited, I have samples of brochures, posters, and presentation material that technical communicators in our chapter have developed for volunteer organizations.

What if I end up doing volunteer work?

If you contact a volunteer organization and end up working for them, please let me know. I'm entering this information in a database so that our chapter will be able to track the impact that this program has had on the community. You can email me at volunteering@stc-soc.org.

(By the way, all of the benefits of volunteering that I listed above also apply to volunteering in our STC chapter—hint, hint.)

About Fei Min Lorente

Fei Min is back in the Waterloo area after graduating from UW and spending 10 years in Calgary. She is currently working at Dspfactory Ltd., running her own business called Articulated Concepts on the side, and is happily getting involved in STC business now that the dust has settled from the Big Move. When she's not doing technical writing or family stuff, Fei Min fills in the spare minutes with scrap booking.