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Volunteering with private individuals or small organisations
Whether or not you’re looking for a job in your field, volunteering can be a great way to start your professional life in New Zealand. It allows you to improve your English, gain work experience and meet people.
If you’re looking for a first experience and want to improve your English (to be able to do odd jobs later on, for example), you can do voluntary work through organisations such as :
For a registration fee, you have access to a list of farms, youth hostels, equestrian centres – in short, various organisations that offer you accommodation (and often board) in exchange for a few hours’ voluntary work for them. If everything goes well with these people, you could even ask them to be your referees on a CV.
It is now possible! More and more Facebook groups are linking hosts and volunteers. The advantage of these groups is that they are free, so they bring together hosts who are not present on traditional volunteering networks. However, the major disadvantage is that, unlike volunteer networks, Facebook does not allow you to see the hosts’ history or reviews of previous volunteers. So be careful, and watch out for scams! And don’t forget: if an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t!
Volunteering with associations or the community
More generally, it is also possible to do voluntary work in associations in jobs that are less often thought of.
Volunteering allows you to become an integral part of the community (something New Zealanders cherish enormously) while acquiring skills and building a network that, in time, can help you land a job you’ve been dreaming of. There are lots of different types of volunteering, such as administration, secretarial work, communications, music, event management, etc. With volunteering, you’re under less pressure (the fear of not being suitable for the job is reduced because there are fewer unpleasant consequences such as redundancy) and you can gain valuable New Zealand experience in the eyes of many employers. You combine the useful (boosting your job search) with the pleasant (a little altruism always goes a long way).
To encourage the recruitment of volunteers, New Zealand has set up Volunteer Centres where you can go and offer to help. There are fifteen centres on the North Island and four on the South Island. You can find all their addresses on Volunteering New Zealand. You can also look at the associations in your town, for example, by going to the community centres and asking them if they know of any associations looking for volunteers.
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