How to Turn Volunteer Work Into a Career (Practical Guide)

Volunteer work is one of the most underused assets in a professional CV. Research by LinkedIn found that one in five hiring managers has hired a candidate specifically because of their volunteer experience. Yet most job seekers either omit it entirely or list it as an afterthought under a heading that signals they don’t think it’s serious.

Here’s how to actually use it.

Why Volunteer Work Is More Valuable Than You Think

The gap between volunteer work and paid professional experience is smaller than most people assume.

Running a community fundraising event involves budget management, supplier coordination, stakeholder communication, and outcome accountability. Managing a food bank volunteer programme involves rota scheduling, training, quality control, and team leadership. Volunteering as a trustee for a small charity involves governance, financial oversight, and strategic planning.

These are not “soft” experiences. They’re often more complex and more responsibility-laden than many entry-level paid roles. The difference is that employers need to see them framed correctly.

The professionals who benefit most from their volunteer work are the ones who describe it in the same terms as paid employment: what the role involved, what they were responsible for, and what the specific outcomes were.

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How to Put Volunteer Work on Your CV

The most common mistake is listing volunteer experience under a vague heading at the bottom of a CV with a one-line description. This signals to the recruiter that you don’t think it’s serious, which is the only message they’ll take from it.

The right approach depends on the relevance:

If the volunteer work is directly relevant to the role: Treat it like any other experience. Put it in your main work history in reverse chronological order with the organisation name, your role title, the dates, and bullet points describing your responsibilities and achievements.

Example format:

Volunteer Finance Lead — Brightside Community Trust
2023 – Present

- Managed quarterly budget of £18,000 across three programmes
- Produced financial reports for trustee board and external funders
- Reduced overhead allocation by 12% by renegotiating supplier contracts

If it’s supplementary: Add a separate “Volunteering” or “Community Involvement” section after your main work history, with enough detail to make the skills visible.

What to include:

• Your specific role and responsibilities (not just the organisation’s mission)
• Scale and scope (how many people, what budget, what reach)
• Achievements with numbers where possible

What to leave out:

• Generic descriptions of what the charity does
• Lists of activities without context for your role in them

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Assess Which Skills Actually Transfer

Not all volunteer work produces the same transferable value. The key question is: what specific skills did you develop, and which of those skills are employers in your target field looking for?

Skills that tend to transfer directly:

• Leadership and people management (managing a team, training volunteers)
• Project management (running an event, a campaign, or a programme from start to finish)
• Financial management (budget responsibility, reporting)
• Communication and stakeholder management (reporting to funders, working with community partners, managing trustees)
• Sales and fundraising (donor outreach, grant applications, community engagement)
• Technical skills (web management, social media strategy, data tracking)

Skills that transfer indirectly:

• Adaptability and problem-solving in under-resourced environments
• Cross-cultural communication
• Working effectively with minimal supervision

The framing matters as much as the content. “Organised weekly activities for service users” is less useful than “Designed and delivered a 12-week structured activities programme for 25 service users, coordinating with external facilitators and securing in-kind donations to cover costs.”

Same experience, different career signal.

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How to Use Volunteer Work as a Bridge to a Career Change

Volunteering is one of the most practical ways to test and transition into a new field without leaving your current job.

The pattern that works:

Step 1: Choose volunteer roles in the sector or function you want to enter. If you want to move into the non-profit sector, volunteering with a charity gives you sector knowledge, internal relationships, and a legitimate line on your CV. If you want to move into event management, volunteering to run events for any organisation gives you a portfolio.

Step 2: Take on increasing responsibility over time. Start in any available role and move toward roles with more clear accountability. A specific title (Volunteer Coordinator, Finance Lead, Campaign Manager) is more useful than “general volunteer.”

Step 3: Build relationships inside the organisation. The strongest career transitions often happen because someone inside the volunteer organisation either creates a paid role or makes a referral to another organisation. Being consistently reliable and proactive is the fastest way to become the person they call.

Step 4: Use it as a reference and portfolio piece. A supervisor in a volunteer role can provide a professional reference. Work you did for a charity — a website, a campaign, a financial report, a training programme — is portfolio material.

Step 5: Apply to adjacent paid roles. Once you have substantive volunteer experience in a new area, you can legitimately apply to entry or mid-level roles in that sector. The volunteer experience is sector experience; frame it that way.

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Getting Credit for Volunteer Work on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a dedicated Volunteer Experience section. Use it — it is indexed separately from work experience and some recruiters specifically filter for it.

In your Volunteer Experience section, use the same approach as your CV: describe your role, not just the organisation, and include outcomes. The “Cause” field lets you tag the type of volunteering, which can surface your profile in specific searches.

The biggest opportunity on LinkedIn is to post content related to your volunteer work — reflections on what you’re learning, observations about the sector, specific challenges you’ve worked through. This signals genuine commitment to the field and builds your visibility with people working in it.

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When Volunteer Work Becomes a Career

For some people, the path from volunteer to employee happens directly within the organisation they volunteer with. Charities, community organisations, and non-profits often have hiring preferences for people who already know their culture and programmes — and who have already demonstrated their reliability without being paid.

The best way to put yourself on that path is to be indispensable. Take on a specific area of responsibility, own it completely, and make it visibly better. When funding allows or a position opens, you’re the obvious person to fill it.

If you’re making a deliberate career change and want a complete strategy for navigating the transition, see the guide on making a career change at 35 — the principles apply at any age, and voluntary work features prominently in the “test before you leap” framework described there.