Technical paper
Learning to be employable through volunteering: A qualitative study on the development of employability capital of young people
Volunteerism
Youth and Volunteering
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This qualitative study investigates voluntary work as a context of informal and non-formal workplace learning and vocational guidance, useful to develop skills and abilities, namely the capital of personal and social resources, that could promote future employability.
Summary
- The study is based on experience from young volunteers participating in the Universal Civil Service, a national Italian program addressed to young people aged up to 28 years, giving them both the opportunity to engage in social activities useful for the community and have the first contact with a working context.
- Participants were invited to describe their volunteering experience in a diary, highlighting if and to what extent this context contributed to enhancing their employability capital, namely the asset of skills, knowledge, and networks acquired, that they could transfer to a future professional domain.
- The narrative data collected were examined through diatextual analysis, allowing the researchers to investigate the meanings young people attributed to these activities.
- In light of these results, the paper contributed to investigate volunteers’ perceptions about the conditions that could best foster this specific kind of workplace informal and non-formal learning and at proposing a qualitative perspective on the analysis of the employability capital they developed.
