Volunteering as a career

Helen Bryer

VOLUNTEERING IS A CAREER move for some people. When Helen Bryer graduated last year, she knew she wanted a job with an international aid charity - but she also knew that the only way to get one was to put in a lot of work for free.

She started with an internship at Oxfam (see profile). "If you're lucky, you can get some interesting work," she says, "but not all volunteering is exciting, and some people end up doing work they don't like." She worked in the policy department, helping formulate Oxfam's line on corruption, work she really enjoyed.

"A lot of finding work is about networking and contacts"

But the work was only a part of the experience. "You get to meet really interesting people, and if you're lucky, one of them might even offer you a job" - though on a short contract, of course. "A lot of finding work is about networking and contacts," she says, and one of the people she met at Oxfam knew of some work going at the UN Development Programme.

With the cash Helen earned from this, she got on a plane to Bolivia - where she had another volunteering job lined up, this time with UNICEF (see profile). "It wasn't an advertised post," she says, "I just wrote a lot of letters. I must have written about fifty or sixty of them, and got three replies. Only one of them said yes." But after four months of unpaid work, she eventually got a short-term, though paid, contract.

Now she's back in Britain and studying for a master's degree in development studies. "It's supposedly not essential," she says, but in an extremely competitive job market, it's clearly an advantage. "Next year, I might be able to get a job!"