- 2 February 2018
- Posted by: Team for Youth Association
- Category: Volunteering Stories
What are the skills that you can get by doing a long-term volunteering stage in another country?
We asked the volunteers from IN4EVS to share with us what skills they think they obtained during these last months of activities in Baia Mare.
Sarah, Austria:
We always talk about how EVS is about developing yourself and your personality, but there’s also some very concrete practical skills to be learned during your project. I got a lot of insight in how to plan lessons and how to do online promotion on social media.
The first skill I learned because of my photography workshops and German lessons. Now, after doing them for a while, I how many tasks to plan to fill the designated time, which kind of activities are interesting for students and how to keep them motivated throughout the lesson. The German lessons require me to really think about my own language and to find a way to systematically explain the rules. That’s a good challenge, and I am very sorry for everyone who is trying to learn German – there are no rules! But I think now I found a way to make it clearer for my student.
Managing the project’s social media pages is one of our daily tasks, and now that I have gotten the hang of it, it is definitely something I will put on my resume. Not only did I learn how to deal with the technical aspects of it (the Facebook page managing tool offers a lot of sometimes complex options), but also the strategies behind it. I learned to constantly keep the audience engaged and updated, which means scheduling posts for times when we are not in the office, or answering to comments and messages as quickly as possible. In our modern digitized world, this is a valuable skill to have.
Juste, Lithuania:
I learned a lot of things doing my EVS service in Romania. IN4EVS project is about promoting EVS. So, I learnt how to work with social media, record a video, how to use Instagram and Canva (graphic-design tool).
Inma, Spain:
When we make presentations in high schools about EVS (this presentations’ names are Info-desks) we always say that the requisites for doing volunteering abroad are not about skills. You don’t need to know something special, or have concrete skills to do EVS. And that’s because this is also about learning.
During this stage the things I’ve learned more are digital skills. Editing videos, and also recording them. Taking photos, managing the Facebook page (even if there are a lot of things I still don’t know about it)… But also other skills related to this ones, like how to write more interesting things online (engage the audience) or how to make more attractive presentations, or make them more formal and easy to follow.
The other big category of skills I’ve learned in this period is, without doubt, about communication. For example, public speech in the info-desks. But also I’ve been learning and improving my Romanian and English. Of course I still have a long way to continue learning both languages, but that’s the thing of learning skills, right? It’s always a process, that we continue developing.