Find out how volunteering can help with your personal and career development.
Learning from volunteeringVolunteering
Volunteering is a great way to enhance your time at university, add to your CV and most importantly give something back. Volunteering is an unpaid activity where you’ll usually help out a charity or not-for-profit organisation. Whether you’re looking for a one-off project or a regular opportunity, there are many different ways you can get involved and do something fun and interesting.
You could take on a responsible role for a University club or society, volunteer as a faculty representative, or for an external charity. It’s also a great way to help you decide on which career path to take.
It’s crucial to enhance your CV to make it stand out from the competition. Volunteering or work experience, not only builds your unique selling points, it demonstrates to the employer that you are proactive, motivated and may be the difference between you receiving an interview or not.
Frania Gillen-Buchert, Events Executive, Events Scotland
You can get recognition for your volunteering and extra-curricular activities through our My Stirling Award, which allows you to showcase your skills to future employers. Find out more about the My Stirling Award.
Volunteering can improve your skills in several ways, it can:
- Give you a great sense of achievement and enhance your CV
- Develop skills employers look for e.g. project management, communication and teamwork
- Allow you to meet lots of new people
- Make a difference in your community
- Give you more confidence
- Help you explore an occupation you’re interested in
Where can I find volunteering opportunities?
Visit our online careers website TARGETconnect to see the wide range of volunteering opportunities available and Careers on Canvas for more on the benefits of volunteering and other sources of opportunities.
You can also find opportunities on our volunteering Facebook page.
We have many on-campus activities you can get involved in:
- Volunteer as a academic representative or faculty officer.
- Write for our student newspaper, Brig.
- Run for election as a Student Union Officer.
- Get involved in a Students’ Union club or society
- Be a buddy or mentor for another student through our Student Peer Support Scheme, STEER.
Elsewhere, there’s a wide range of student volunteer opportunities available in Scotland, through Volunteer Scotland.
International volunteering
There are volunteering projects around the world. Most will ask for some kind of donation or fee to cover costs, therefore ensure that you research the company thoroughly before giving any money.
At Stirling we have access to a brilliant resource called GoinGlobal that will make this process a lot more straight forward. This web site allows you to Spend less time looking for information and more time acting on it with these resources:
- Country and City Guides for more than 120 Locations: Proprietary country and city guides, all written by local employment experts and constantly updated.
- Global Job & Internship Search: Access to 16 million job and internship postings. Updated daily, these opportunities can be searched in the local language, as well as in English.
- Key Employer Directory: Provides profiles and key contact information for more than 450,000 local and multinational companies throughout 196 countries.
It also gives you advice on making applications including CV guidelines and cultural advice for interviewing.
You can access GoinGlobal for free while on our campus. However, if you are not on campus you can access via Careers on Canvas: working abroad or the resources section on TARGETconnect.
Other useful resources:
- Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) - offers specialist short-term projects and volunteering for 18-25 year olds in over 30 countries
- Step Together volunteering - you can build a profile of your ideal volunteering project which is then matched against the projects in the database
Contact the Careers Service
You can contact us via TARGETconnect.
Stay up to date
Follow us for the latest information about what's going on in the Careers Service.
Volunteering opportunities
Explore current volunteering opportunities below, or login to TARGETconnect to see