How to Include Volunteer Experience on Your Resume

Is it acceptable to include volunteer work on your resume when you're applying for jobs? Adding volunteering to your resume can help you get hired—especially when you don't have a lot of paid work experience to include.

Volunteer work can be an excellent way to showcase key skills such as event planning, fundraising, or problem-solving and can be integrated with your other paid work experiences or listed separately.

How to Include Volunteering on Your Resume

Including volunteer work on your resume is an especially important tactic for any of these reasons:

• You're a student without much (or any) formal work experience.
• You are a recent college graduate with limited professional experience.
• You're considering a career change to a different occupation or industry.
• You have taken a significant amount of time away from the workplace to raise young children or to care for a sick family member.
• You have experienced a lengthy period of unemployment due to a depressed economy in your state or region.

The goal is to incorporate your volunteer experience into your resume to highlight the skills that help qualify you for a job. The way to accomplish this will depend, to some degree, on how related your volunteer experience is to your career target. 

Related Volunteer Work

Related volunteer work can be combined with related work experience under a category heading like "Related Experience." If the volunteer work demonstrates a critical skill area, then it could be placed within a category with a functional heading like "Fundraising Experience" or "Event Planning Experience." 

In either case, the volunteer experience should be listed just like a job with a title that captures the essence of your role and a description that highlights skills applied and any accomplishments.

As you list your accomplishments, it is also a good idea to quantify these contributions with tangible numbers (dollar amounts) or percentages.

Here's an example:

Unrelated Volunteer Work

If the volunteer work is unrelated to your job goal, you can incorporate it under a separate category like "Community Service" or "Volunteer Work." Most organizations look favorably upon staff who contribute in a positive way to the surrounding community—not only does it reflect well on the company, but volunteering can also be an opportunity for staff to network with potential new clients for the organization.

Here's an example of how to include volunteer work on your resume when it isn't directly related to your career or industry: 

Volunteer Resume Example

Here's an example of a resume that includes both work and volunteer experience:

Are You Looking to Volunteer? 

Not only is volunteering good for your community, but it also has the potential to benefit your career. A volunteer position can be a networking opportunity, help you sharpen your skills, and serve as a low-risk way to explore a new industry.