Career Tip: Don’t Just Hunt for Your Next Job…Develop It!

From Flickr user suttonhoo

By Steve Joiner; cross-posted from the Idealist.org homepage blog. Click here to peruse the Career Corner archives.

What exactly is career development and how is it different from just looking for and then applying to openings? The truth is that the work world is still ours to create, to develop, and to grow.

I was at a career development conference last week and one of the keynote speakers—a fantastic Career Development professional named Denise Bissonnette—had a lot to say about this very idea. Her talk focused on the idea that professionals in the

Careers: Brand New Career Transitions Book for Current and Former Service Corps Members

My career transitions book is live on Idealist! Free, downloadable, accessible from any place with an internet connection — and written just for you.

I’ve been working on this for almost a year — giant thanks to everyone who helped out reading and offering feedback!

Intended for national and international service corps audiences of all ages, Service Corps to Social Impact Career – A Companion to The Idealist Guides to Nonprofit Careers is a free new book from Idealist.org.

While most resources and trainings focusing on “life after” the corps begin and end with career search skill building, Service Corps to Social Impact Career emphasizes integrating career development throughout the term.

The book highlights practices that current corps members can incorporate during their service experience which also prepare them for their next steps, including discerning their professional calling, gaining relevant skills, building relationships, and documenting their accomplishments.

For corps members actively transitioning from their service term to a career or further education, Service Corps to Social

Career Tip: Timing Your Job Search and Supporting Yourself During the Transition

If you aim to move onto a salaried job after your service term ends, you may be facing some big logistical challenges — when do you start actively looking for your next job? If you don’t have something lined up when your term ends, how do you support yourself till you land that job?

When to Start Your Active Job Search

Regardless of your service corps, your term probably has a definite end date.  If that is the case, lining up a job can pose tricky questions, such as when do you start applying for jobs? And when, during the application process, do you let the hiring team know your availability limitations?

When to start your active job search—sending in applications—is a little fuzzy. The typical job search takes about six

ProInspire Helps Business Professionals Transition to Nonprofit Careers

New fellowship program places business sector emigres in critical roles in nonprofits in the Washington, DC, area.

Launched during the worst economic climate in generations, ProInspire eases the path of business professionals to find careers that are more meaningful to them — while helping nonprofits recruit people with the hard financial and other skills crucial for their long-term sustainability.

With the application deadline just days away (April 8th) for its first group of Fellows, ProInspire hopes to infuse the nonprofit sector with people who are trained with financial and project-management skills common in the for-profit sector. And any influx of staff may help in the long run. The nonprofit sector is projected to need to recruit 640,000 executives in the coming years as the baby boomer generation begins to retire.

Career Tip: Setting Yourself Up for Success!

In my workshops with corps members who are considering their future career transitions, I  first emphasize things they can do during their term to get ready for their next steps, whether it’s going back to school or taking on a job.

You do not have to wait till the very end of your term to gear up for “Life After…”. You can do several things now to help you prepare — things that enhance your performance in your service corps, and that may help you relax about the changes ahead.

1. Save material evidence of your service experience: numbers, photos and “artifacts” (writing samples, performance evaluations, thank-you notes to you, agendas of meetings or events you organized, etc.)

2. Discern your next steps! Take some time to figure out what you want to do. Also see the self assessment exercises in Chapter Three of the Idealist Guide to Nonprofit Careers. The Idealist Guide to Nonprofit Careers is a free, downloadable guide to the nuts and bolts of a career transition — and is applicable to any sector, though the focus in on nonprofits. Look for the companion guide for corps members coming this summer.

3. Once you know where you may be headed, figure out who is already there — and how they got there, how they like it, what they actually do.

Maintain good relationships with the people in your service community (partners at other organizations, for example) by striving to be a good resource for them. Build additional strategic networks through informational interviewing.

Ask people in your network where local jobs are posted in the fields you‘re interested in. Don’t forget that many nonprofits and government agencies  list their jobs only on their own sites. Idealist.org has job listings, too, is expanding to offer government job postings, and you can sign up for email alerts; other nonprofit-specific job sites you can check out here.

Learn how to talk about your service experience with the people in your new networks, and prepare to talk about it for the job interview. Also check out this podcast show featuring Meg Busse, co-author of the Idealist Guide.

4. Build new skills. Take advantage of projects you are working on at your host site to explore new roles you can play to get on-the-job practice with new skills. Let your site director know what your training needs are — for direction about where to get the support as well as to suggest possible topics for the existing, regular trainings you have with other members of your team.

Seek out other professional development workshops, or if you can, take a college course.

Check out The Resource Center for free online training, recorded webinars, and resources for your professional development. If you have specialized expertise, share it with others on your team.

5. Finally, beef up your job search skills, or learn as much as you can about grad school. For nuts and bolts of your job search — resume crafting, writing cover letters, prepping for your interview, negotiating a salary — please, please check out the Idealist Guide to Nonprofit Careers which you can download for FREE.

Specific questions about your career transition? Please email us at TheNewService@idealist.org and we’ll try to answer them (without identifying you) on the blog.

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Career Podcast, Networking for Nonprofit Careers!

The newest Idealist.org Careers podcast features an interview with my colleague Meg Busse, co-author of the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers.

The Guide walks job seekers through all the steps of the nonprofit job search, from describing the nonprofit sector and self-assessment to developing a stellar resume and interview skills. The book is available in two versions — for the first-time job seeker, and for the sector-switcher— for free on our website.

Meg Busse is the Coordinator of High School and College Career Transitions at Idealist. Along with creating resources, she works with career professionals and guidance counselors to connect students with careers in the nonprofit sector.

I interview Meg about Chapter Four of the career guide, “Networking.” We discuss the value of building relationships to begin and sustain a nonprofit career through volunteering and through informational interviews.

Listen now.

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Career Tip, Discerning Your Career Path!

What is discernment? Why does it matter for a corps member? The most frustrating and at the same time most exhilarating question of a U.S. person’s life is, what should I do with it? And that is what discernment is all about.

Discernment is the process of figuring out where your passions and values are leading you in your career and life. It may take any of these forms:

• A bolt of inspiration
• First-hand experience
• Reflection
• Observation
• Conversation
• Research
• Meditation or prayer

Done right, at the end of the process of discernment you should feel confident making decisions that influence your career and education. You should be able to articulate the direction you are headed in, and why.

And why does discernment matter to a service corps participant?
Your term of service can enhance your discernment process by exposing you to all-new experiences, giving you time and a forum to reflect on these experiences, and put you in touch with new networks of people whom you can observe and talk with about their paths and choices.

Discernment during your term of service can help your career because the process will narrow down your many choices and make your search for work or school more efficient. Once you have a sense of where you are heading, you’ll know better which networks to join, what questions to ask, which skills to build.

Careering towards your future
You may have come into your service term with an unwavering sense of what you’ll do when the term ends, you just want help getting there. On the opposite extreme, you may have no idea at all, period, and were hoping the term of service would offer you a refuge from thinking about it for a year or two. You may be somewhere in the middle.

It’s probably best not to feel that you have to find one career choice that fits the rest of your life. That’s old-school thinking, though you may get pressure from your parents to find a single career path and stick to it.

If you are participating in a service term at mid-career, you already know that career changes are almost inevitable in the United States today! People change jobs more frequently now than ever before, and the concept of “career” itself is ever-changing.

Steve Pascal-Joiner, author of The Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers for Sector Switchers likes to point out that an old version of the word to careen is to career, as in:

Career, (verb): move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction (The car careered across the road and through the hedge.)

Career, (Archaic phrase): “in full career” meaning “at full speed.”

He adds that in his own career can be described similarly: moving swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.

Indeed, how long you stay in a job may be pretty closely tied to your generation:
•    Baby boomers (born between 1946-1964) stay in a job an average of 5 years (and thus have held about 5-8 jobs in their working life times)
•    Gen X (1965-1980) stay in a job an average of 3 years (and thus have held about 3-7 in their working life times)
•    Gen Y/Millennials (1980-2000) stay in a job an average of 16 months (and thus have already held 2-6 jobs in their working life times)

While you may be more prone to move from job to job throughout your career than your grandparents were, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will always be free to launch yourself in new directions.

Recognize that once you have invested in specialized education, started making a living salary, and taken on expenses such as a mortgage and/or family, backing out of one path and embarking on another is quite a challenge. The more you can do to think through your options and personal compatibility with career choices, the better.

Tools for Discernment
Chapter Chapter Three (PDF) of the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers offers a couple very good exercises to help you figure out the trail head to the career path that resonates with you, and to see what opportunities are out there for you.

• The Tracks exercise, developed by David Schachter of NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, gives you a way to explore job openings that inspire you — either because of the position description or the organization. (Listen to the Idealist podcast featuring Schachter.)
• The Four Lenses approach, also developed by Schachter, aims to help you think more clearly about your career prospects by narrowing down what exactly it is you mean when you say “I want to work in education,” or “I want to work on the environment.”

So read that chapter.

But, what else can you during your term to help you discern what’s next for you? Fleshing out the list I drafted above:

A bolt of inspiration isn’t exactly something you can do. It is something that strikes you when you least expect it. Echoing Green’s book Be Bold talks about the “moment of obligation” — when change agents identify what means the most to them, and then commit to carry out their dreams. You can read about Wendy Kopp’s bolt of inspiration to create Teach For America in her book One Day All Children…: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For American and What I Learned Along the Way.

First-hand experience includes what you have done in the past and what you are doing during this service term. The more, varied experiences you make for yourself, the more information you have to go on. Challenge yourself to try things you never thought you would enjoy, volunteer in new roles or on new issue areas.

Reflection is key to discernment. Someone wise once said, “It’s not experience that is the best teacher—we learn nothing from experience. We only learn from reflection on our experience.” Consider keeping a journal, or setting aside time weekly to debrief and evaluate your own experiences. What kind of activities, people, and environments have given you more energy? What activities, people, environments have served as your own personal Kryptonite (sapping your strength)?

Observation gives you a chance to see for yourself what different opportunities entail, and give you an idea if it’s for you. You may have never had a chance to work on an organic farm, but if you could spend a day or two seeing farmers in-action, maybe even working alongside them, asking questions about their work, you’d get a more vivid understanding of farm work. Public interest law may sound good to you, but it’s not something you can practice without a huge intellectual, financial, and time commitment. But shadowing a lawyer, observing in a firm — these are ways to give you a clearer sense of what you’d be doing as a lawyer.

Conversation with mentors, peers, and professionals in your target field gives you a chance to introduce yourself to potential colleagues and employers, listen to advice, and ask questions of people who are already engaged in careers you are considering. Informational interviewing is one format for these conversations (see Chapter Four (PDF) of the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers). Informally, you can chat with people about their work and education at parties, community events, family reunions, etc.

Research is the way to find out what jobs, organizations, and/or degrees exist, what benefits you can expect from different career paths, how much your skill set is worth on the job market. The Tracks exercise is one kind of research in Chapter Three of the Idealist Guide mentioned earlier is a spirited way of doing the research; conversation is another.

Meditation or prayer can play important roles for some people when making major life decisions. Consider using vacation time away from your service site to take part in a retreat or solo exploration time, if that would help you gather your thoughts. Or consult with leaders of your faith community about resources and traditions you can tap into that will help you unearth your life’s calling.

Discernment during your term of service strengthens your service experience by sharpening your senses and encouraging you to agree to new opportunities and responsibilities.  The process can bring direction to your work, and confidence in your response to those pesky “What will you do next year?” questions.

Having a direction also helps you to prioritize which additional skills you need to develop, and which additional relationships are important to nurture.

This blog post has been adapted from a section of the forthcoming Service Corps Companion to the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers, due out this coming spring from Idealist.org.

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How the Media get National Service Wrong (Sometimes)

As news media pick up stories about graduating students missing out on high-power corporate jobs and falling back on national service, some details are skewed.

Here is my rebuttal to some stories I’ve seen in the media lately about national service as a solution to college student angst about employment and loan repayment. Like this one from the Wall Street Journal, and this one from MSN Money.

A term of national service is not the same as nonprofit employment. And there’s a lot more to public service than a year of stipended national service. It’s misleading to say that when the Class of 2009 is locked out of entry level positions at huge corporations, they may opt for “nonprofit work” by joining AmeriCorps for $10,000 a year.

What’s wrong with that kind of reporting?

1. Recent coverage is perpetuating the false idea that only people rejected from business careers look into national service and nonprofit work.

Service is not the job you can get when no one else will hire you. Competition is high for national service slots. Far more people apply to most service corps than there are openings. For example, Teach For America saw 25,000 applications last year, but only needed a fraction of that to fill all its corps member openings. Chicago’s Inner City Teaching Corps has gotten five times the number of applicants than it’s had openings.

Service organizations are looking for people committed to social justice, who actually have volunteer, leadership, and issue-focused experience. People for whom a term of service is a plausible commitment, and who have something to offer communities.

And in fact, you can actually graduate from college aspiring to a national service experience or nonprofit career — because you are committed to social change, community issues, living your faith, etc. That is, if people who are mentoring you can educate you about these kinds of opportunities.

Mid-career professionals who’ve dedicated their lives to earning their companies a profit are often surprised to find how tricky it is to break into the nonprofit sector. While business skills are valuable in running nonprofit organizations, and many nonprofit careerists earn MBAs, the nonprofit sector is not the repository of people who didn’t make it as capitalists.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a capitalist.

2. A term of national service is not an alternate career path or a nonprofit job.

A term of service is usually a year or two — it’s not exactly an alternative career path. It’s short term. After your term you can decide what to do next — you’ll have more experience than you did as a college senior, but your options in life are still as wide open.

While most U.S.-based service programs are 501(c)(3) nonprofits themselves, corps members are supported by a range of host sites, not just nonprofits. Corps members teach in public schools and serve in local government agencies, as well as in nonprofit organizations.

Nonprofit careers do exist — and national service is a great launching point. To understand nonprofit careers better, check out the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers.

3. Finally, one of the biggest misunderstandings people—including reporters—have is that nonprofit = no money. That nonprofit work is volunteer work and doesn’t count as a “real job” that can support a person or family.

At Idealist.org we have had to work hard, and will continue to work hard, to get people — college students, career counselors, parents, mid-career professionals — to let go of certain notions they have of nonprofit employment.

Saying that college grads will settle for a $10,000/year “job” in the nonprofit sector because of the loan repayment benefit implies that nonprofits pay poverty wages to staff. That’s a serious issue for the nonprofit sector wanting to beef up its workforce and leadership pipeline (PDF) in time for baby boomers to retire. And it’s irresponsible journalism.

From the Idealist.org document debunking the top-ten myths about the nonprofit sector:

The term “nonprofit” refers to the 501(c) tax code in the United States. Non-governmental organization, or NGO, and “charity” are the common terms used outside the United States. Revenues generated by nonprofit organizations go back into programs that serve the organizations’ mission. There are no stockholders receiving annual financial dividends, and employees do not receive a bonus at the end of a good year. According to Independent Sector, $670 billion are earned by nonprofit organizations annually, and one in twelve Americans work in the nonprofit sector.

To learn more about the nonprofit sector, read Chapter One of the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers. To learn more about nonprofit salaries, check out these free, online resources: Occupational Outlook Handbook, Salary.com, and CareerBuilder.com (use the term “non-profit,” with a hyphen).

To learn more about service opportunities, check out the Corps and Coalitions list on the right-hand sidebar of this blog.

David Eisner’s recent speech about the need for national service explains its value from the perspective of governing healthy communities during an economic downturn.

Choosing a Service Corps: Questions to Ask

To bring the most to your community, and to get the most out of your service experience, ask good questions before you even sign on.

Enlisting in a service corps is a great commitment: long hours, little pay, intense investment in the people you serve, and often close quarters with other corps members or colleagues.

On top of that, you have easily over a thousand program options available to you if you are a U.S. person. (I don’t have an exact number for you but I am working on that.) Domestic and international, secular and faith-based, direct service and indirect service, famous and obscure, individual placement and team-based placement—so many options! (See Corps and Coalitions in the sidebar of this blog for a partial list.)

You owe it to yourself and the corps to investigate your short list of programs thoroughly. But you also have to know yourself, your preferences, your requirements, and your goals. Be smart about your search!

Listed below are questions that I adapted from the Catholic Network of Volunteer Service, a member association of Christian service programs, which offers these lists of questions for you to ask yourself and to ask program staff when you are researching programs.

Questions to ask yourself:

WHAT IS MY MOTIVATION FOR SERVING?

You should enter a service program keeping in mind personal and professional goals, so that when you encounter challenges at site, you remember why you joined in the first place. Some responses may fall into categories such as:

• Commitment to changing my community for the better
• Professional development/ skill building
• Spiritual path
• Personal growth
• Experience before career and grad school

WHAT EXPECTATIONS DO I HAVE?

• Of myself
• Of the program
• Of my work

Really spend some time figuring out your assumptions and expectations. Do you envision yourself helping  people in your community directly? — or are you expecting an office job? Do you anticipate using some skills you’ve already got, or learning everything from scratch? Are you hoping your service program staff will be very involved with your work—observing, offering feedback—or removed from your day-to-day activities?

WHAT DO I HAVE TO OFFER?
Listing assets will help you apply for a position, craft your resume, etc. Let your list influence — at least in part — where you choose to serve. Searching for a program that takes advantage of your current abilities will help you find a good match — one that’s beneficial to your community, your service site, and you. Consider what you’re bringing to the conversation:

• Professionally
• Personally – talents/gifts
• Strengths/weaknesses

HOW DO I HANDLE CHANGE AND STRESS?
You’ll encounter stresses. Are you sure you are ready for them?:

• Moving/ leaving support system
• New supervisor, constituents, community, job, and environment
• Low-income lifestyle
• Cultural adjustments

WHAT FINANCIAL NEEDS WILL I HAVE?

Consider not only groceries, rent, and entertainment. Once you know what your living allowance would be in the corps, work out a budget. Can you make ends meet? Read more on financial management for the corps member.

• Options for forbearing or deferring student loans
• Managing other debt you’re bringing with you to the program
• Child care expenses
• Transportation

Questions to ask the service program director and/or site manager before joining

Generally speaking, it’s preferable to research the program’s web site and literature thoroughly before asking any questions of program staff. To learn more about preparing for an interview, check out Chapter Nine of the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers.

WHAT IS YOUR PROGRAM’S FOCUS?

• Issue areas (poverty, environment, education, etc.)
• Function (do corps members serve as grant writers, construction workers, educators, program developers, communications, etc.)
• What other service programs are doing what yours does?/What’s the difference between your program and [another program you are considering]?

WHAT IS YOUR SUPERVISING STYLE?
It’s important for you to find a supervisor who can balance attention to you, with freedom for creativity and autonomy. Once at site, you can get what you need from your supervisors by asking for it clearly.

• Highly directive
• Hands off
• Adaptive of the corps member’s needs throughout the year

WHAT TYPE OF PLACEMENT DOES YOUR PROGRAM OFFER?

You must balance what you have heard about the program, with what the program truly offers.

• Domestic/ international
• Rural/ urban
• Professional skills required
• Length of commitment
• Direct or indirect service
• What will I spend my day doing

WHAT CAN I EXPECT FROM YOUR APPLICATION PROCESS?

• Paperwork involved
• Apply to the service program headquarters, or to the host site/agency
• Personal interview/ phone interview; how many
• Medical and dental examinations
• Documentation (If your program is affiliated with an academic degree program, will I apply separately to each? Do I need to take any standardized tests? Do you need to see my undergraduate transcripts?)

WHAT ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS DOES YOUR PROGRAM HAVE?

• Citizenship
• Education level
• Undergraduate Grade Point Average
• Volunteer experience?

WHAT BENEFITS CAN I EXPECT FROM YOUR PROGRAM?

Sometimes the true benefits cannot be listed on a page.

• Opportunity to serve; work for social justice
• Training and networking opportunities
• Career transitions support
• Community and peer support
• Cultural education
• Language training (when applicable)
• Room and board
• Stipend or living allowance
• Health insurance (Does it exclude coverage of pre-existing conditions and certain prescriptions? Does it cover mental health services, if I need access to that?)
• Child care allowance
• Student loan deferment/forbearance (Are these allowances compatible with my student loans?)
• Scholarship or fellowship opportunities

MAY I CALL SOME OF YOUR PROGRAM’S ALUMNI?

This is helpful in getting a different perspective from someone who has completed the program.

• What kind of support did the service program staff offer (skills training, conflict resolution, access to benefits, career transitions, etc.)
• What did you do every day?
• Did you feel you could see a difference in your community through your service?
• How did you live on the stipend?

Resources

Treat your search for a service corps as you would a job search—cast your net widely, and make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. For more on nonprofit careers, see the Idealist Guide to Nonprofit Careers. Chapter Five includes a table that compares a handful of the most famous corps: service programs for early-career professionals (PDF), service programs open to mid-career professionals (PDF).

Career Tip, Document Your Service!

Saving facts and artifacts to share with hiring managers and grad admissions

Among the most important things you can do during your term of service is to keep records of your accomplishments now to share later, during job and admissions applications.

By “records” I mean everything from numbers to writing samples to screen shots of web sites you helped design to photographs of you or your clients in action.

The Facts of Your Service: Numbers

At the very least, keep track of your numbers. What the numbers are will depend on your type of service. Hours of training is a common one.

If you are a teacher, tutor, after-school coordinator, or trainer, keep track of numbers of students or participants; increase in grades and test scores from baseline assessments at the start of year; number of classroom volunteers you recruited and managed, etc.

If you are a project developer, keep track of dollars you raised, community partnerships you developed, clients your program served, meetings you facilitated, volunteers you recruited and managed, etc.

A great way to measure the impact of your service is not only to count your direct clients, but also the indirect clients of your service. Two examples: if you are an AmeriCorps member working with adult learners of English, look at the help you’ve offered the adults, as well as the benefit to their children, and the community. If you are an AmeriCorps*VISTA developing a volunteer program, count your volunteers, as well as the impact of their service.

When you are ready to transition, use at least some of the numbers in your resume and in anecdotes about the impact of your work! Numbers help a hiring manager or admissions committee put your resume into context and understand the impact of your work.

(See these chapters from the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers about preparing your resume and for the job interview.)

The Artifacts of Your Service: Portfolios

One way to present the artifacts of your service is to create a portfolio — similar to a professional scrapbook — of your service term, with sections for each skill set you have built or employed.

The portfolio can start off with your position description and/or work plan, your resume, your Description of Service (for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers), constructive performance evaluations, letters of recommendation, workshop evaluations, and thank-you notes or emails that describe the impact of your service from colleagues, community partners, and others.

Skill sets to include may be anything from trail and house building to grant writing, event planning, curricula development and teaching, program development, volunteer management, etc.

Mini-portfolios to leave behind

Rather than taking the whole portfolio to interviews with you, you can photocopy relevant sections and leave them behind at the interview, for the hiring manager or admissions counselor to look at in their own time.

I don’t recommend offering more than a few samples of your work, but I do recommend you wait till you are prompted to offer recommendation letters or reference contacts.

Online portfolios

Alternately, you can create an online portfolio like Beth Kanter — the guru of social media use for nonprofits — has done, through a tool like Wikispaces (public spaces are free). Include the link on your resume and cover letters with the rest of your contact information.

Online portfolios are especially useful if you’ve used multimedia to document your service. Linking to your audio or video podcast on iTunes or Youtube is easier if your portfolio is already online.

And a warning: Keep in mind that if you have designed web pages or developed web content, capturing the image of the web page through a screen shot is still the best route for documentation. Linking to the web pages is too risky. Once you have left your service site, you won’t know if your web pages will be updated, if links will have gone sour, or if your pages will have come down altogether. Because you have no control over the pages after you are gone, it’s best to preserve them visually through a screen shot rather than linking to them.

Writing samples

Writing samples are great to include in your portfolio.  A common question I get is what to use when you are asked for professional writing samples.

Depending on  your position this year, you should have a chance to collect a variety of these. Anything professional you’ve written should work — from grant proposals, brochures and newsletters, formal emails or letters, project descriptions, focus group or survey summary reports, web content, press releases, etc.

If you are in a direct-service role with few opportunities to write, try to create a reason to write tied to your service like a narrative summary of your service or a specific service project.

Hang on to your documentation

The problem many service corps alumni face is that they’ve saved all these documents on the computer at their old service site, and now that they are finished, can’t access them easily to share during the job or school search.

Save yourself the heartache by emailing documents and photographs to your personal email account, or backing them up on a thumb drive. You can also use online tools like Google Docs and Flickr to access documents and photos later on.

Returned Peace Corps Volunteers can request a photocopy of their Document of Service from Peace Corps, to be sent to them directly or to their hiring manager or graduate admissions office. (Peace Corps keeps your DOS for 60 years.)

Other reasons to document

Documenting your service is not just useful for your next steps. Keeping good records helps during your term with grant writing and reporting, monthly reporting for AmeriCorps*VISTAs, communicating with your supervisor, preparing for your mid-term or end-of-service performance evaluations, and creating public relations materials for your program.

This blog post has been adapted from a section of the forthcoming Service Corps Companion to the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers, due out this coming spring from Idealist.org.

Building strong ties to local college career centers

Your service corps program and your Corps members can benefit from a good relationship with local college and university career services offices.

This afternoon I have the honor of working with directors of Oregon’s AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps*VISTA programs around the topic of career transitions for Corps members. One message I want to drive home is that developing ties to local career centers can help both with recruitment of new Corps members, and also helping current members with their next steps. Here are some ideas:

Getting Started: Invite career center staff from local colleges and universities for a brown bag lunch in your office to share resources and compare complementary needs. Some schools are part of a consortium that hold regular meetings; you could ask about presenting at one of these meetings. Some career centers have a counselor who focuses on public service; when you make your first call, you might ask for that person.

Be a presence (not just a flyer) on campus when it’s time to recruit: Staff tables at the school’s career fair, and let the career counselors know that you are available to speak at panel and round table discussions. Ask if there is a way to post your general and recruitment information on the career center’s website or resource library, or to staff a general information table on campus. (Idealist.org also organizes nonprofit career fairs hosted by career centers on college campuses throughout the United States.)

Be a resource on national service: Work with the career counselors to put together a panel on national service opportunities for college students. Help find current or former AmeriCorps, AmeriCorps*VISTA, and NCCC members, Jesuit Volunteers, Jewish Coalition for Service program participants, Peace Corps Volunteers, Teach For America, Public Allies, or City Year Corps members (seek people from a variety of service programs) to speak on a panel discussion, to help clarify college students’ options and understanding of the differences among the programs. Students may not understand how to apply to a program, or may be confused about the de-centralized application process for some programs. Be ready to offer guidance at least for your program!

Educate counselors about the benefits of national service: Let career counselors know that for some graduating or even gap-year students, doing a year of national service is a really good way to serve your community in a more concentrated, intense way than you may be able to through traditional, episodic volunteering. It’s also proven to be a  launching point for a public service career. Students looking for a year of work experience before going to graduate school will benefit from serving – often with a high level of autonomy, challenge, and responsibility – for an organization that doesn’t expect a long-term commitment. If they can think of the term-of-service as a fifth and/or sixth college year – during which the students serve the community, learn tuition-free, and may not have to pay student loans – the investment makes more sense. Not to mention the networking and the educational benefits!

Exchange career transitions support: As you develop relationships with career centers in your area, you might:
•    Ask if Corps members can attend resume and other workshops at the career center.
•    Arrange for college students to shadow Corps members for a day; establish a list of members who would be open to informational interviews and share it with career office contacts; invite college students on community service projects.
•    Offer for you and your Corps members to play the “employers” for mock interviews with college students – it is a great exercise for your members to be on the hiring side of an interview process.

Find more career resources for national service members on Encorps’s Beyond the Service Year and What’s Next, and on Idealist.org through the career center, career guides, and Term-of-Service page.

This blog post has been adapted from a section of the forthcoming Service Corps Companion to the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers, due out this coming spring from Idealist.org.

Grad school for social change

This week, the Idealist.org Graduate Degree Fairs for the Public Good kick off the 2008 fall tour on September 10th in New York City!

(Please note that due to the Service Nation Summit’s Presidential Candidates’s Forum on Sept. 11 at Columbia, the venue for the NY fair has changed!)

The fairs bring together graduate schools that focus on positive societal change, and public service professionals– like you? –who want more education to further their careers.

If you are thinking about grad school, it’s one of the best ways we can think of to meet staff from some of the country’s top schools in degrees ranging from nonprofit & business management and social work, to public policy & administration, public interest law, public health, journalism, international affairs and more.

If you don’t live near one of the cities where the fairs will come this year, check out the Idealist.org Public Service Graduate Education Resource Center with lots of resources for going back to school. Read here for information specifically for service corps alumni.

Looking for experience before going to grad school?

Graduate admissions staff recognize service corps programs as a great way to get valuable, practical experience in the field to prepare for grad school.

If you are considering participating in a service program, know that several programs have benefits that await you after you are finished with your term.

Programs funded through AmeriCorps offer the Eli Segal AmeriCorps Education Award; the amount varies depending on the term of service, but a full term typically means $4,725. (The amount hasn’t been increased in a over a decade, though RPCV Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) and others in Congress are working to rectify that with the AmeriCorps Act of 2008.) The ed award is held by the National Service Trust until you are ready to use it, and can go towards tuition at most schools, or for student loans. Dozens of grad schools match the ed award so that your award may be doubled if you enroll at those schools.

Teach For America, an AmeriCorps program, has also fostered partnerships with many top graduate schools around the country that benefit TFA Corps members through application deferments, scholarships and ed award matches, and application fee waivers.

As we have written about before on this blog, Peace Corps also has two programs, Masters International and Fellows USA. The latter is specifically for people who have returned from Peace Corps service already.

A pretty good comparison (including education benefits) of some of the more famous service corps programs can be found in Chapter Five (PDF) of the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers. Also check out Equal Justice Works blog about public interest law. Other associations of social-impact grad schools can be found among Idealist’s grad fair cosponsors.

Do you know of other benefits for service corps alumni not mentioned here? We’d love to hear about them!

Also Idealist is still looking for grad school bloggers! Click here to see if blogging for us sounds compelling to you!

Also note that many grad schools offer benefits to service corps alumni that aren’t through official partnerships with the service programs. It’s always a good idea to ask at your target institution.