While digging around my delicious account, I came across this article from The Chronicle of Philanthropy that I had saved last fall. Re-reading this piece, I thought about many of the things Nathan writes in his book and in this blog. The article suggests that non-profits emphasize their “context”—their mission, how their work is important—when they recruit new employees, as the “millenial” college graduate is more likely to follow his or her passions when choosing a career path.
Nonprofit groups should sell not just the job to potential employees but also the “context of the job,” says the report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, in Baltimore. Charities, for example, ought to emphasize that the nonprofit workplace can offer a greater sense of personal fulfillment and flexibility than many jobs in the business world.
“There needs to be a recognition of the enormous asset that nonprofits enjoy that they can offer a life of meaning to people,” says Lester M. Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins University center and one of the report’s authors. “This will be especially appealing to the millennials, a generation of young people who are looking for work experience that is full of meaning.””
I’m not, nor have I ever been, an educator, but I do work with educators and, as someone who has spent a significant amount of her career in the non-profit sector, feel a bit simpatico with those in the profession. Like teaching, many of us enter the non-profit sector out of a sense of idealism and a need to influence those issues/people we feel passionately about. Like teaching, many of us give up monetary benefits for those less tangible ones. And, like many teachers, non-profit employees often deal with lack of funding and resources that sometimes make doing our jobs difficult.
For all of these reasons, non-profit work and education both tend to suffer a bad reputation, especially amongst young adults considering career paths. So, how do non-profits and education sector keep attracting fresh, new graduates? Will essentially rebranding, as the article suggests, our professions make career seekers emphasize the positives of teaching and non-profit work over the negatives that include lower pay, fewer resources, and a high burnout factor? How would you sell the context of your job to a potential employee?
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