An underrated career accelerator
I strongly believe that the process of founding or accelerating a non-profit organization as an early contributor is one of the most underrated career-accelerating decisions you can make early on in your career.
To justify this belief, I want you to consider a (simplified) model of how to create a successful career (obviously, there are a lot more definitions and views of what makes a career “successful”):
One way to create a successful career is to develop a skillset that lets you capture value at scale
Considering the above-mentioned mental model, I want to highlight 3 areas of skills that are widely regarded as essential to solving this monumental task of “capturing value at scale” and more importantly, outline how founding or contributing to a non-profit organization can help you to develop these skills very early on in your career.
In the following, I refer to a situation in which an individual is working part-time for a non-profit organization without receiving a salary (volunteer) while maintaining a fulltime role as a student or employee.
1 Getting good at sales, communication, and telling a story
The best way to be good at sales is to genuinely believe in what you’re selling. Selling what you truly believe in feels great, and trying to sell snake oil feels awful. — Sam Altman
There is no good business without selling a product. Unfortunately, there seem to be fewer people out there that actually like the process of selling and even less that are actually good at it. According to many practitioners, however, sales as a skill is something that can definitely be learned. But as it goes for every relevant skill, in order to learn it, you must practice it consistently.
If you work in a non-profit organization, you can learn and experience a sales and a fundraising process not only in a fairly safe environment (little sales pressure, assuming most people in the org work for free) but you can also sell a product that is actually worth selling. Some may object that not every non-profit is selling something — well, at least you will need to sell your vision to others! Either by donating, by convincing someone to act, or even to join you on your mission.
2 Learning to prioritize tasks and becoming a quick problem solver
“The oldest, shortest words — ‘yes’ and ‘no’ — are those which require the most thought.” — Pythagoras
It is absolutely crucial (especially as you do have a “real” job and do your non-profit work on the side) to learn how to prioritize tasks and solve them quickly.
Very rarely do you observe clear processes and easy ways to do things within a non-profit organization. Instead, most of the times you will hit one or even many roadblocks along the way that prevent you from reaching your personal and your organizational goals and it will be on you to solve them.
Embrace these opportunities! These are the times when you learn real applicable skills when it comes to problem-solving, which will help you later on in your career. Most people are not exposed to these kinds of problems while studying and will first encounter them in the early years at a full-time gig.
One thing to keep in mind is that the learning process simply never stops. Because guess what follows early success? More work. You will encounter many new opportunities arising. And with more opportunities, it gets increasingly hard to continue to be successful due to the sheer amount of things to pick from. Choosing the right things to work on, however, is a very difficult task and needs to constantly be practiced.
3 Building a network, inspiring people, and managing a team
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” — Reid Hoffman
Working together with great people is one of the greatest levers to create impact. In order to get there and to realize the potential, you could think of 3 major areas to focus on:
- Building a great network
- Inspire people from your network to work with you
- Manage these people effectively
Building a network. At some point in your career, you will find that building a network of other ambitious people who want to drive impact is one of the highest leveraging activities you can do as an individual since most (if not all) great work is done by teams.
Therefore you should make sure to start as early as possible to build up your own network in the field you are passionate about. A great way to do this? To me, it is to find likeminded people that are as ambitious, curious, and driven as you are. Find ways to create impact together and for another. You will most likely find opportunities down the road that you would not have imagined to find there.
Non-profit work is also an excellent mechanism to engage with people that are maybe a little “out of your league” when it comes to experience. But don’t be intimidated by these people and their great accomplishments — more often than not they have similar goals and similar aspirations when it comes to doing good. Hence, you will find that there is an incredible amount of influential people that will do their very best to support you in your good cause.
Inspiring people. One of the best ways to ensure that you are able to bring in great people is to inspire others to join your organization’s mission. This task is often regarded as the ultimate challenge.
For those of you who consider founding a startup as a career, this is especially important to learn. Founders (especially first-time founders) will ultimately be in this situation, when you a) don’t have the finances and/or b) the reputation that other big corporates, growth startups, or consulting companies have. It will be your job to convince high performing individuals to join forces with you even though other options are extremely tempting.
However, even if you are not considering to found a startup yourself, the skills to inspire others and to lead by example are very good ways to prove and signal your leadership qualities for future employers and people within your network.
Managing the people. For most people, the first time to manage a team is after 3–5 years of experience. Surely, you will get there sooner when you join a startup rather than later in, for example, a corporate career.
In contrast, as a non-profit founder or contributor, it will be your bread and butter to not only manage your team properly but even more so to inspire others to work for your organization — in many cases even for free.
With management responsibility also comes the requirement of learning how to operate a team efficiently. And believe me, even practitioners with 10+ years of experience often do not know how to run a team effectively. And this comes as no surprise — since this is by far one of the hardest things to learn.
Many great management books have been written about this topic and still, I have never come across or heard about someone that learned it by simply “reading” about it.
What I took away from the discussions I had about this topic, is that you will need to experience the difficulties that come with this process and it will be beneficial for you to do so as early as possible. The one common strategy across the shared experiences I received is to read about certain techniques and implement these based on trial and error in your organization. And with time, you will experience the difference in the effectiveness of your organization.
Summarizing
To sum up, I regard social entrepreneurship as an activity with limited downside and unlimited upside. When I speak to friends who also started non-profit organizations or joined in the beginning, many experience the learning curve throughout the process as incredibly intense. And more importantly, for most, it is not the learning outcome, but the joy they find throughout the social entrepreneurship road that provides the most value for them.
I strongly believe that many of you could do the same and not only do good in the world but can also accelerate your career like never before. I sincerely hope that you consider to use some of your time and contribute to a non-profit organization that tries to solve the problems you deeply care about.
Why TechLabs is the right place to start your Social Entrepreneurship career
If you are passionate about digital education, TechLabs is certainly a good place to start looking for opportunities.
TechLabs is a well-established association with various subsidiaries across Europe. We are constantly looking for great people like you to support us in our mission as we dream of a world with no digital illiterates.
You can find more about working at TechLabs here. And if digital education is exactly the problem you want to tackle, I am more than happy to chat with you. So please feel free to reach out.
