Want to develop your soft skills? Try skilled volunteering
This is a guest blog by Alistair Forbes, Co-Founder & CEO of the Tech for Good Alliance
Career development pathways offered by tech companies tend to look something like this: a corporate training seminar, a subscription to an online learning platform, or a certificate in agile project management.
They are clean, predictable, and qualifications-based. And, when chosen and implemented well, they are fantastic tools for professional development. But they tend to be ill equipped to help people develop one very crucial human skillset: soft skills.
It’s very hard to practice human negotiation, emotional intelligence, real communication or leadership in a simulated environment. To truly build what the tech industry calls "soft skills" - which are some of the hardest skills to master - you need to step out of the comfort zone of your day job.
And the most effective, underutilised accelerator for that growth is skilled volunteering.
Why skilled volunteering differs from business as usual
In a typical corporate engineering or technical role, your boundaries are well-defined. You’re handed a ticket, you work within a structured architecture, and your interface with the "client" is heavily buffered by layers of product managers and account executives. It is, in many ways, a safe and well-defined sandbox.
When you step into a charity or non-profit environment as a tech volunteer, that buffer disappears.
You’re in a world where the stakes are immediate, the budgets are non-existent, and technical capability is often missing. In addition to that, your work in these environments takes on a new relationship to meaning. Take this quote from a software engineer who volunteered through the Tech for Good Alliance in 2023.
“I wasn’t quite prepared for just how invested I’d become in each of the charities; I was expecting it to feel more like a day-to-day project, where we just do the work and hand it over to the client… But we’ve taken on a real feeling of ownership and responsibility to these charities, because what we deliver really matters for these people.”
In a day job, responsibility is often diffused across a corporate hierarchy. In a lean volunteer project, that responsibility is concentrated. You learn the weight of accountability because you can see the direct line between a line of code you write and a charity’s ability to support the people who need their help.
76% say volunteering developed their communication and negotiation abilities
The data backs up the reality that corporate training cannot match the development curve of frontline problem-solving. According to Deloitte’s research into workplace volunteering:
92% of corporate human resource executives agree that volunteering improves an employee’s broader professional skills
82% state that they actively look for volunteer experience on resumes when hiring for leadership positions
76% of employees who volunteer report that it developed their core communication and negotiation abilities
Why? Because skilled volunteering allows you to take on roles you otherwise wouldn’t. For Thomas, it meant jumping ahead on his management trajectory:
"I got the opportunity to take on a more managerial role - so not directly working on the technical aspect of each project but rather looking at the big picture. This involved requirement gathering, expectation management, and delivery management to the clients. It was a far cry from my day job as an engineer."
You can’t learn these skills from a slide deck alone, and AI can’t do it for you - you learn it by doing it when it matters. After skilled volunteering you return to your day job with a sharper perspective, an enhanced capacity for empathy, and a proven ability to manage complex human dynamics under pressure.
