I applied to volunteer with the International Citizens Service (ICS) in September after hearing about their youth volunteering programme through a friend. The programme (funded by the government) helps people aged 18-25 volunteer abroad by providing them with information, training and funding. I applied online for a volunteering position with one of six charities that ICS work with.
After my application I received a quick telephone call to clarify some of the details on my form – such as previous volunteering experience, why I wanted to volunteer etc. Then a couple of days later I was then invited to an assessment day on 16th October at VSO’s London office.
Pretty straight forward.
Ok quick backtrack to fill in what happened between my application and the assessment day:
This was a long long day, starting at 8.30am and finishing at 4pm, meaning I had to get up at 5.45am and get the tube in rush hour – not my idea of fun. However, moaning aside, the day was actually informative, laid back and relatively fun. I did feel slightly pressurised as I knew I was being assessed and was hoping I was making a good impression, but I suppose that is normal. Luckily I was in a group with 6 other hopefuls all who were very friendly and slightly nervous as well.
ICS say on their website: “We’re looking for people who are good at working with others, flexible and adaptable, and demonstrate a positive, realistic commitment to the programme.” So I had an idea of the characteristics that would be considered desirable.
The people hosting the assessment day were also very open about what they were looking for which helped settle nerves a little bit. They arranged a mix of group tasks for us followed by an individual interview.
All of the group agreed that the tasks were things you couldn’t really prepare for and you just had to use your initiative. We all discussed that it was best to be honest with our opinions and attitudes rather than to try and say what we thought the assessors wanted to hear – as we felt that if we were not honest, although we might end up being successful, we might also completely hate the programme. Volunteering abroad is a pretty big commitment so we all agreed we should only go if both the assessors and ourselves thought that we were right for it.
The individual interview was very in-depth and was about an hour long – asking lots of questions about personal views and approaches to many things. Again this wasn’t something you could really prepare for. There were a few standard interview questions like “tell me about a challenge you have overcome” paired with much more personal questions than you might expect from a normal interview. I don’t want to give too much away but the aims of these questions were to find out if we would have any difficulty overseas and if we had realistic expectations of what volunteering would entail.
Towards the end of the day we got a presentation on fundraising which is a key part of volunteering through ICS and this was really useful in giving everyone some ideas as to what they might do if successful.
The assessment then finished at 4 and we all went home hoping to hear from VSO sooner rather than later!
If you're interested in doing something similar to Olivia you'll be able to follow her diary here over the coming weeks.
