Volunteers Get a Career Boost

Computerworld - IT professionals who do charitable volunteer work get a variety of benefits, including recognition in the workplace, new management skills and a good-looking line on their resumes. But the volunteers say it's really the feeling of doing good that motivates them to contribute their expertise to the less fortunate.

Nonprofit organizations like Geekcorps in North Adams, Mass., and Tech Corps in Maynard, Mass., recruit and place IT volunteers in underdeveloped nations and underfunded schools to help create and maintain a technology infrastructure so that emerging nations and U.S. schoolchildren can participate in the increasingly global and high-tech economy. In the process, volunteers can pick up skills that will bolster their careers.

Eva Bradshaw begins her fourth year as a volunteer for Tech Corps this month at an elementary school in a tough neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. Bradshaw and other members of the informal Ohio State University (OSU) Women in Technology group were concerned about the lack of interest young girls evince in computers, math and science—and decided to do something about it by volunteering with Tech Corps.

The women helped fourth- and fifth-grade girls learn about PCs, including software for word processing and Web design. The girls also disassembled and assembled hardware and learned what each computer part does. Bradshaw says their excitement about the after-school project was infectious.

"It energized me working with them, despite it being after my full workday," says Bradshaw, an OSU technology director.

She says it also boosted the reputation of her group on campus. "Within the CIO's office, it enhanced our professional image, because we were able to put the project together and make it work," she says.

Karen Smith, executive director of Tech Corps, says the nonprofit group screens volunteers for nearly 2,000 schools in 20 states, but she claims that the current fiscal crises among the states have created a "crying need" for more IT volunteers. "In this era of budget crunch, the technology coordinator position for schools is in jeopardy," Smith says. Tech Corps estimates that a typical school district has one paid tech coordinator for 750 computers.

Management Training

Geekcorps, which is a division of International Executive Service Corps, a nonprofit development group, has had little problem attracting volunteers, according to Executive Director Ana Maria Harkins. Its database boasts 1,500 willing workers, but Geekcorps sends out only 50 people a year to projects in Bulgaria, Ghana, Mongolia, Rwanda and elsewhere.

Olivia Given was "just a coder" when she took a leave of absence from SeniorBridge Family Companies Inc., an elder care provider in New York, where she would typically "put on a set of headphones and say, 'Don't bother me.'"