103 Working in the voluntary sector

As a starting point, write down everything you did in a recent activity. This could be something you completed at work, while volunteering or spending time with your family, or in your community or other position. For each task, note down roughly how much time you spent on this (either actual time in hours or as a percentage of the day).

You will return to this list in Activity 2.

Here is a list of tasks carried out by a garden volunteer.

You may have found from doing this activity that it is sometimes difficult to explain what your job actually is. You may have so many different responsibilities that it is impossible to sum up your job succinctly; for example, the list of activities you undertake may often go beyond your job description. 

From this example, you can see that the volunteer does more than just straightforward gardening tasks. Although he was recruited to do garden maintenance (and this is what the volunteer job description specifies), he has also been involved in open days, events for donors and research on the local area. He has been asked to do these other activities because of his wider interests and experience. Other things he does because he has been asked by the staff, he has identified a need or he wants to help address other people’s concerns. Like many people, he enjoys variety in his work or volunteering. Volunteers often have experience from other jobs that they like to draw on and that go beyond their formal job description.