And there's a charity out there looking for your skills. No doubt about it.
That’s certainly what I used to think, and what I’ve heard many inspiring, talented professionals say as well. It can be tough to see how your day job can translate into a charitable setting, especially if you work at a very big, or very corporate organisation, or have a particularly niche job description.
The things you do at work every day are valuable, and there are many skills that can be used laterally.
Say a charity is looking for a professional to help them develop annual reports and financial strategy. Perhaps the obvious professional would be a finance manager or an accountant. But any professionals with report writing and data analysis skills would also be a fabulous resource for the charity. Perhaps you are a data analyst, sales manager or researcher, you could certainly bring a unique and valuable perspective to the task.
Another common call-out by charities is for someone to help them create compelling marketing content for emails and social media. There are professionals who do this work as a day job, say a copywriter or a digital marketing manager. How about other creative and compelling writers, like a journalist or even a comedian?
Lastly, charities often look for experts to mentor and train entrepreneurs or students in business skills. For this, anyone with a love of developing others, plus a bit of business acumen is pro enough to do the bono. You may be a successful team leader or executive. Or perhaps you’re often commended for training junior team members. If either are true it’s likely you’d be really brilliant at mentoring a keen bean in a charity to develop themselves.
There are thousands of ways professional skills can be applied to charitable settings, so it's important to find the right opportunity for you that makes use of your valuable skills and fits well into your life.
So, hopefully now you can see that you don’t need to go and find a charity looking for your exact job spec. There are many ways to repurpose your skills so they can be used for good, and the benefits to you are far reaching. The next step is to work out what sorts of jobs you actually want to do, because it needs to be exciting and rewarding for you too. An exercise I do in my meets is to get professionals to list out their day-to-day responsibilities. And from that pick out the elements that they love doing, and the elements that they always get positive feedback from colleagues on. These are the skills that are valued in your workplace, and you are naturally brilliant at, so they are also going to be valuable in another setting. Most importantly, they are skills you are going to enjoy offering pro bono to a for good organisation.
Create a list of five professional skills you have to give by asking yourself:
Sign up to one of Skilling Time's free workshops to design your ideal pro bono experience.