Charity and non-profit
There is a lot of competition for paid opportunities with charities, therefore it’s important to take a strategic approach and be persistent. Develop a network, use your contacts and take advantage of unpaid volunteering opportunities.

Head office roles
Charities very rarely offer structured graduate training schemes. The opportunities which are available to fresh graduates, are often at an administrative assistant level, in a specific function area such as finance or marketing. Graduates seeking these entry-level positions will need to demonstrate having acquired relevant skills, either during their degree or in the course of work experience or extra-curricular activities. Examples of relevant skills might include IT skills, interpersonal skills, and administrative and project coordinating capabilities.

Such entry-level roles (even when unpaid) are often over-subscribed because of the demand for charity work; this brings into play the importance of persistence, strategy and building networks. As well as the passive approach of responding to job applications, you may wish to try the active approach: sending a speculative CV and covering letter to a long list of charities which you are interested in working for (the More page of this report has directories which list charities in different areas); and following up, a day or two later, with a phone call to the Human Resources or office manager. In this phone call, attempt to convey your enthusiasm for the charity’s work, and for the challenges of working to support it; and stress the relevant skills you have acquired. A key method of gaining skills and exposure is through volunteering.

The fact that there are many unpaid roles both in head offices and in field roles is a key attribute of the charitable sector which can be used to your advantage. In addition to giving you experience, volunteering will boost your CV, demonstrate your commitment to charity work, and may even, in the best case scenario, lead to a job offer with the organisation; at the least however it should allow you to make contacts. Volunteering can therefore be a way to break the familiar catch-22 of ‘no job without experience; no experience without a job’. The question then becomes how to fund one’s volunteering. There are a variety of solutions, ranging from fund-raising, to taking a temporary or part-time paid position before or during volunteering.

Field roles
Paid field roles are often only available for skilled practitioners with an educational background in a relevant technical area, as well as experience in the field, often acquired in the first instance through volunteering. Examples of paid field roles might be doctor, construction engineer, micro-credit advisor, social worker. If you do not have a relevant undergraduate training for the field role you’re interested in, a postgraduate course may be the ideal way to fill the gap (see below for more details on this).

Non-skilled roles in the field are often filled exclusively by volunteers. It is rare to find a paid position for a non-skilled field worker. It’s worth noting that many UK charities which work overseas, in development for example, only employ nationals of the countries in which they are operating; because they have greater relevant experience and knowledge.

Further study as an entry route
Because many field roles demand specific technical capabilities, as outlined above, an option for students and graduates who have not acquired them in the course of their undergraduate degree, may be to take a postgraduate course. The nature of the course will vary depending on the kind of charity work which the candidate will later go into; although there are some generalist postgraduate courses for working in the charity sector, as described in the Training section.

It’s worth mentioning that charity recruiters for field roles usually demand field experience in addition to a relevant technical training; therefore candidates should research job advertisements for the types of positions they are interested in, and use a combination of study, volunteering and paid charity work, if they can obtain it, to support their application.

Prospects for career progression
In head office roles, opportunities exist to progress into management positions, and to ever-greater levels of seniority and responsibility. This means eventually having more strategic input into the direction of a charity’s work, within the broad outline of the aims it was chartered to fulfil; and into the way that it goes about fulfilling those aims. In field-working roles, again, progression involves attaining positions of management responsibility in the field – and eventually perhaps going from overseeing local projects to coordinating efforts at regional or national levels.