For a long time, I treated volunteering as something adjacent to my real career, as something you do while studying. What I’ve come to understand through experience, not theory, is that volunteering is one of the most powerful ways to enter a sector. And like any entry point, it is a choice. A choice about which systems you step into, which problems you learn to understand, and which opportunities become visible to you over time.
Volunteering is not neutral
Graduates often talk about volunteering as if it’s generic: “I just want experience.” But volunteering is never neutral. The organisation you volunteer with determines the sector you are exposed to, problems you learn to work on, language you adopt, the networks you enter, and the pathways that later open up to you. In other words, choosing where you volunteer is choosing which sector you begin hope to understand.
What UNICEF taught me about multisectoral work
My experience as Chairperson of the UNICEF University of Johannesburg (UJ) Campus Club fundamentally reshaped how I think about volunteering. In practice, UNICEF South Africa operates across multiple sectors simultaneously: education, child protection, nutrition, youth advocacy and policy.
Through UNICEF UJ, the volunteers I worked with were exposed to how different sectors intersect around child and youth development. A volunteer might start thinking they’re interested in education and suddenly find themselves learning about nutrition. Another might join for advocacy and gain exposure to policy. The work was multisectoral, and so was the learning. That exposure mattered. It shaped how we understood opportunity. It made it clear that careers are not confined to neat boxes – instead, they move across systems.
Volunteering as structured sector access
What made the UNICEF experience powerful wasn’t just the brand. It was the intentional structure of the work. Volunteers weren’t just completing tasks. They were engaging with real sector problems, working alongside practitioners, seeing how programmes are designed and funded, and understanding how public institutions, NGOs, and communities interact. This is what sector entrance looks like in practice. Not a job title but proximity to real work.
From sector exposure to sector entrance: Amukelani Literacy Foundation
Founding Amukelani Literacy Foundation deepened this understanding from a different angle. As CEO, I see clearly how volunteering functions as entry into the education sector and its sub-sectors such as early childhood development and the after-school sector. When volunteers join Amukelani, they are not just “helping out.” They are learning how education systems operate outside formal schools, how NGOs interact with public education structures and how programmes are implemented at community level.
Over time, this becomes sector knowledge, not just experience. That knowledge travels with them when they apply for roles, fellowships, or further opportunities in education, development, or the public service.
The mistake graduates make when volunteering
The most common mistake graduates make is volunteering without intention. As a result, when job hunting begins, their volunteer experience feels disconnected. They struggle to articulate how it prepares them for specific roles or sectors. But this isn’t because the experience lacked value. It’s because the sector practices were never made explicit.
Rethinking volunteering
Volunteering is not something you do before your career starts; It is often how your career actually starts. The organisations you choose, the problems you engage with, and the sectors you enter through volunteering quietly shape your trajectory long before your first formal role. If graduates approached volunteering with the same intentionality they approach job applications, fewer would feel lost when it’s time to transition. By then, they wouldn’t just be looking for a job, they would already know the sector they belong in.
>> Read another blog by Thulani Khumalo: Sparking change through Fix My Food
