My Volunteer Experience - Aaron Monaghan
Photo: Volunteer Aaron Monaghan
It's National Volunteer Week 17 - 23 May 2021 and we're featuring our volunteers
Aaron Monaghan
Connecting Up would like to congratulate and farewell Aaron, who joined us on 17 February 2021 and has recently left us in 3 July 2021 after gaining full-time employment. He came to Connecting up this year with a background in retail, video production, online marketing, and clothing production, and worked to develop a template for producing video content during his time here. Aaron has written about his experience with Connecting up, which can be found below. We wish him all the best in his future ventures.
Our volunteer Aaron who recently joined us in February is moving into full-time employment as of July - Congratulations Aaron! He writes of his experience here:
During my time as a Volunteer Information Officer at Connecting Up I was able to work with a great group of people who were all dedicated to the SAcommunity program and were undertaking a variety of projects in updating the community service database and enabling the service to be used by more local councils.
I have a background in retail, video production, online marketing and clothing production, and my time volunteering allowed me to use my video production skills to assist this program by creating an intro clip, gain experience working in a more corporate setting using available media tools (that varied from those I generally use) and learn to develop a media project template with storyboarding, I found it to be challenging but very rewarding.
In June I moved into a full-time position in customer service at News Corp but have thoroughly enjoyed my time volunteering in the SAcommunity program, utilizing my skills in ways I had never used them for before. I have been able to meet many great people who I have since connected with via LinkedIn through the Volunteer Alumni and Connecting Up network.
Some people have helped me way outside their role at Connecting Up, include Rob Kalka, Business Development Manager who provided me with great information to use in interviews and helped me land my current position at a business marketing company.
Whilst volunteering at Connecting Up, as part of the training and development, I was able to learn about the importance of writing a personal biography for myself to recognise the strengths I possessed and identify my goals moving forward, giving me an opportunity to improve and build on these skillsets and to form my 'elevator pitch'. This is practiced by everyone as part of our introduction to other volunteers, staff and ideally, prospective employers. In volunteering, I was able to get a taste of what corporate work in an office would be like, as my prior working experience was in retail. I also had time to meet the other volunteers, have some great conversations with them and even played ping-pong as part of an ice-breaker/team building exercise!
Volunteering forced me to step out of my comfort zone, it made me meet many great people and apply my skills in different ways than what I deemed possible when I first started volunteering at Connecting Up. I also loved that I was part of program that was able to give back to the community and help bring awareness to the various non-for-profit and charity organisations within various councils across South Australia.
At Connecting Up, I contributed to the SAcommunity program by developing a template for a video storyboard which can be used for a multitude of new video-projects, as well as creating standardised intro/outro video clips for the SAcommunity service to use in their future promotional and training video content. In order to create these, I was able to learn two whole new media software programs I never knew about before; Camtasia and Canva. Canva is a piece of software I see myself using for my own personal media content creation projects on YouTube, utilising this new tool towards supporting the platform which currently has over 1.5 million views.
I have now landed a position as a Customer Service Representative at a news and communications company which involves dealing with a lot of customer service situations and I believe my time at Connecting Up has helped me with that by giving me more confidence. Since volunteering I have also worked in marketing and been contacted to make sponsored videos on YouTube for a couple of brands with products ranging from wallets to watches. I have been able to promote these in a better manner than I would have been able to before volunteering, learning how to effectively market services or products when we were looking at creating a plan to promote SAcommunity services to local councils. I have also got back into working on my clothing venture, on pause during COVID, with a new passion and now plan to start a second brand.
I believe that none of this would have been possible without my time spent volunteering as it has helped me recognise my skills as well as give me the confidence to trust in myself and in what I have to offer to the workplace.
