Health and social care is one of the largest volunteering sectors in the UK. This includes organisations like the NHS and charities which improve the wellbeing of people of all ages. So what do helpers actually get involved with? The opportunities are more diverse than we imagined as our bloggers reveal.

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Monday Jul 25, 2011

Unexpected Benefits

This week I experienced a rather  unexpected benefit of voluntary work, I was asking for advice regarding my CV and one of my colleagues who  had previously worked in recruitment was able to provide me with some extremely useful constructive  criticism, I’m glad to say this resulted in a significantly improved CV. Working on the CV meant I was unable to verify as many organisations as I normally do in my weekly stint , to rectify this I brought some work home to complete, the CV advice I received was excellent so I was happy to develop a small technical guide in return, which my colleague is free to use at the job club she organises After  a month or two of volunteering at Help Direct I feel I am starting to know most of the people  I work with. It’s nice having a day each week to look forward to, however plenty of work still gets done In recent weeks the social aspect of my volunteering has become more prominent, the voluntary work at Help Direct has become my sole opportunity to interact with others outside my immediate family

Posted by Carl ( 2:20 PM )
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Monday Jul 04, 2011

A Brief Recap

This week I was able to spend more time correcting the database I¿ve built, it generally works correctly, but not perfectly yet. One or two bits of functionality lie beyond my current ability to implement; I certainly aim to overcome these problems in upcoming weeks, this has the benefit of both increasing my skills and self confidence and Help Direct will hopefully gain a fully functional database, populated with current data, I was also able to help a colleague with software problems she was experiencing, now I¿m confident she has the ability to utilise the software correctly, Personally the major benefit of my voluntary work is the chance to interact with other people, limited interaction with others is a major problem with unemployment, now I¿m starting to find my feet in my voluntary role I¿m able to make a more useful contribution, in addition to getting to know other members of staff, my self confidence is going from strength to strength, fortunately the database I have created has dramatically increased the number of organisations I can check in my weekly 4 hour stint, I¿ve discussed the database with a colleague and I attempt to implement the changes he suggests, these final tweaks will hopefully make the database perfect for our purposes, other shortcomings I correct as I find them, these final changes are the icing on the cake with the database being an estimated 85% complete. I¿ve enjoyed working with other team members to develop a high quality solution designed to completely meet our requirements, which is something you miss when unemployed plus it¿s also been a handy refresher course on databases.

Posted by Carl ( 2:29 PM )
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