How Volunteering Helps Your Career

As more employees see volunteer work as a way to learn new skills or move their careers forward, volunteering has become a sort of corporate benefit. Companies are increasingly offering time off for volunteer projects, volunteer work on company time or company-organized efforts.

VolunteerMatch, an online database that pairs volunteers and nonprofits, now has roughly 70 corporate clients, up from 30 in 2005 and 47 in 2006. The client list -- which includes Google Inc., Target Corp., General Mills Inc., Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co. Inc. -- keeps growing, according to Jen Kim Field, director of VolunteerMatch Corporate Solutions, a division that creates employee volunteer programs for companies.

For an annual fee between $5,000 and $50,000, companies can give their employees access to a VolunteerMatch list of 55,300 nonprofits seeking help. Nonprofits join for free.

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