"Help yourself while helping others"

This past Thursday I attended the annual dinner of the Metro DC Chapter of the "American Society of Training and Development" (www.dcastd.org) in Arlington, VA.

The dinner was primarily a celebration of ASTD volunteer service over the past year, and was aptly themed "Helping Yourself While Helping Others." This is such a great theme, and I think it really highlights a forgotten aspect of service: that dedicated service to others, to your community, to your country not only benefits those who you serve, but also your own professional life. We see this most clearly when we directly apply our professional talents, as is the case with my virtual friend and shipmate Rachel Polish (@rachelpolish), an Ogilvy PR vice president by weekday, a Coast Guard Public Affairs Specialist by weekend, or at an annual event in Berkeley County, WV where medical professionals from around the area come together for a weekend providing free care to those less fortunate in their own community.

I am reminded of the call to service campaign that New York City ran this past summer and into the Fall (and perhaps continues, but I have not been there since September). Billboard advertisements, such as the one I snapped in the photo seen here, suggested to all who passed that "Everybody's got something to offer," and that service is really about finding what it is that you love and that you are good at, and then donating that passion to serve the public need.

There is so much to be done in the world, and there are so many opportunities for good people with real skills to make it happen--not grandiosely through major programs and press announcements, by spending their time doing what it is they do best. Speakers at the ASTD event suggested that meaningful, rigorous, and authentic volunteer experiences (my words) do belong on a resume alongside your paid professional experience, that such experiences can help to enrich and advance your career, and that those suffering through a rough economy can use this unpaid professional time spent to show future employers that the mind has been engaged and the skills have been kept sharp even when the best jobs or upcoming promotions were hard to come by. ASTD and speakers also provided some concrete tips that I will provide at the conclusion of this post.

I attended the event with Gary Nordlinger, the Coast Guard Auxiliary's Director of Policy and Resource Management, as we represented the Auxiliary on a night dedicated to volunteer service. It served as a great opportunity to speak one-on-one with several ASTD members interested in serving with us. I posted on the Flotilla Arlington | Northern Virginia earlier that day about opportunities for learning and development professionals to apply their talents in service with the Coast Guard Auxiliary; the post is available at http://nova.cgauxnet.us/news/posts/astd1209.

My first experience with ASTD, the folks there reflect very well on what seems to be a great organization. Not only are they very welcoming to guests and newcomers--behavior not always present in these types of groups--they clearly care very much about the collective professional goal of developing better organizations and talented, educated people to make those organizations succeed. If your work is in education, training, human performance, or organizational development, you should learning more about ASTD at www.dcastd.org, and consider joining them locally or nationally. Their collective suggestions maximizing volunteer experiences include:

• Document your achievements;
• Ask about opportunities to supervise or train others;
• Identify and discuss your goals for the position with the volunteer coordinator or manager;
• Be honest about the level of commitment you can make to a role so that you can stick with it;
• Look for opportunities that inspire your creativity;
• Be passionate about the organization or task for which you are volunteering;
• If you are passionate about an organization, but don't see an advertised role that you are interested in, ask if there is a need that can be filled by creating your own role;
• Ask for references at the end of your volunteer experience;
• Ask your volunteer manager or coordinator if they will provide a recommendation on LinkedIn (make sure you list your professional volunteer experience there);
• Pay it forward - Think about asking your company you get a new job at about supporting your volunteer organization with resources;
• Network with other volunteers and staff within your volunteer organization - send them a LinkedIn invitation;
• Take the initiative - Look for opportunities not defined in your role to help the organization (do this at work, too!);
• Show your can do attitude - step up and take on tasks that may have been left undone by a volunteer who left the organization be honest about when you can get the task done; and
• Write thank you letters at the end of your experience (create good will!).