My Internship and Volunteer Experience - Renu Bala

Renu Bala, former volunteer, now employed at our Infoxchange head office in Melbourne

Connecting Up is pleased to announce that our former volunteer Renu Bala has now started her full-time career with our parent body Infoxchange as a Junior Implementation Consultant on the 23 March 2022. Knowing her journey as a graduate to intern to volunteer to employment was one likely traversed by many other students she wanted to share her experiences with our other volunteers.    

Renu Bala began her career with a Bachelor of Information Technology in India, before migrating to Australia and first joined Connecting Up Inc. with graduate Chen Li as part of an IT Professional Year Internship in December 2018 to March 2019 following their Master of Information Technology (Enterprise Management) studies at UniSA. Their internship at Connecting Up involved undertaking a digital transformation project and summary report involving customising the Better Impact Volunteer Management System and the induction, tracking and reporting processes of volunteers for the SAcommunity program.

Renu's Job Seeking Journey
Chen completed his internship, continuing to volunteer for Connecting Up before transitioning into an analyst role at a not-for-profit organisation. Meanwhile Renu searched for work looking to find her first job without a job history, a dilemma many job seekers face.

"When I applied for jobs people kept saying to me, come back when you have experience, and I said 'how can I have experience when no-one will give me a job?'"

She moved to Melbourne in March 2020 to improve her job opportunities, where she was immediately met the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown.

Volunteering with Connecting Up
Consequently, Renu decided to rejoin Connecting Up remotely as a Volunteer Information Officer in the Data Analytics Team, creating analytic reports for councils on SAcommunity data. She began volunteering for Connecting Up to gain greater insight into community information services and gain experience in data analytics, working with different business analysis tools such as Google Analytics, Power BI and Canva as well as Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, Excel and Teams.

Volunteer Networks and Experience
Renu received step-by-step training from volunteer Stathis Avramis and ongoing feedback from the Volunteer team on her data reports with weekly catchup's and monthly online meetings with volunteers finding about all the projects occurring in SAcommunity across the Media and Communication Team, Information Management Team, Customer Service Team and what they were working on and news from the whole organisation. Renu also accessed Infoxchange's People and Culture Team's health, wellbeing and educational workplace programs which ran online each week including yoga, meditation and lunch & learn sessions on a range of topics, and more recently the Community Chat Cafe, providing her with the opportunity to learn about and interact with staff across the Australia-wide organisation.

Connecting Up Training and Education
Renu undertook relevant Connecting Up training and education programs to further her knowledge in data analytics in the NFP sector. All interns and volunteers have the opportunity to meet a mentor, and during her internship Renu met with Head of Connecting Up Pankaj Chhalotre to learn more about leadership and discuss Renu's future career goals.



Photo: Kat Maher, Project Manager & Business Analyst / QA Test Analyst at Infoxchange provided mentorship

Infoxchange Mentors
Returning as part of her volunteering, Renu was able to access a mentor session with Kathryn Maher, Project Manager and Business Analyst / QA Test Analyst at Infoxchange, where they were able to talk about Kathryn's experiences of working in these fields,  Renu's interest in this area and in the organisation itself.

"I had a mentor session with Kat Maher which was great. We talked about her BA experience and my future career goals and all in all it was just great!. I learnt that the best thing about IX [Infoxchange] is working for social justice and people in need and I wanted to work for them." 

Photo: Samantha Whillas, former volunteer also now employed at Connecting Up and Renu Bala at the Infoxchange Melbourne office

We were pleased when the volunteer team received this message on our Slack channel:

"Hi everyone, I am very excited to let you all know that I am starting my career with Infoxchange tomorrow as Junior Implementation Consultant. It would not have been possible without Connecting Up’s support.

I have enjoyed working as Volunteer Information Officer (Data Analytics). It has helped me grow professionally and learn. From my experience, I would like to recommend networking if you're looking for opportunities and, of course, not to give up." ~ Renu Bala

Congratulations Renu!