Volunteering Builds Skills, Provides Career Growth

Almost every issue of the Business Journal this year included a column called Giving, featuring a multitude of ways that local businesses support the communities that support them.

In many cases, this support took the form of people donating their time and energy to organize fund-raisers,

It turns out that in many cases, the employees and the companies they work for may actually have been benefiting as well, with more than just warm fuzzy feelings.

It's called, among other things, service learning, and Blue Shield is one local company that is embracing it as a tool with a dual purpose--to support their community development projects and give employees opportunities to develop new skills that can enhance career growth.

"We run over 100 community projects up and down the state throughout the year," said Ronda Wilkin, manager of corporate community relations for Blue Shield of California. "Obviously it takes a huge team to run that many community programs and I am the only full-time, paid employee to do community service."

What Wilkin and others have realized is that in the process of organizing and managing a community service project, a person can gain valuable skills that will help them in their career.

Take the case of Sue Sculler, who works as a data analyst in Blue Shield's medical informatics department. She is also the chair of community relations for the company's Woodland Hills office.

Her committee takes on about 10 projects a year, said Sculler.

While she delegates most of those projects to other committee members, one she managed herself was the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation fundraiser walk at Dodger Stadium on Nov. 1.

"Because I'm not in a management position at this time, this role has helped me with having a budget and showing I can manage people and time to get the project done in a successful manner," said Sculler.

For example, "she had to help recruit team captains so there's recruitment--we had about l0 team captains who then helped get their folks involved," said Wilkin, "She had to put out communications; she needed to deal with the (juvenile diabetes) organization so she was working on her networking and her interpersonal skills and communication skills; she had a budget to work with."