For her talk on networking at the SENSE2020 conference, entitled Using your network to branch out into new areas, fellow SENSE member Sally Hill got in touch to ask if she could use me as a case study in her presentation. She remembered me saying that I thought one of the reasons I got my current job as an in-house translator at Leiden University was my experience managing the SENSE content team. She wanted to illustrate how volunteering is a valuable form of networking, and was curious to know – looking back – if that was indeed the case. This is what I told her.
Volunteering for SENSE definitely helped me develop new skills and gain experience that I could apply in my work and add to my CV. My SENSE volunteering career began with the social media team. I volunteered after attending the social media workshop given by Henk-Jan Geel that SENSE organized back in 2016. As I didn’t do much with social media, joining the social media team seemed like a good opportunity to gain some experience and to do my bit for SENSE. I figured it might inspire me to use social media for my business and would be a good way to keep up with new developments and spot potential business opportunities. This role involved collecting and posting content to SENSE’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages.
Around the same time, the then editor of eSense, Gini Werner, asked if I would help with editing and writing for eSense. This seemed like a good chance to see how others edit and learn from them, and to gain some writing experience. One piece I wrote was about LinkedIn. While researching the piece, I updated my profile and started being more active on LinkedIn – and a new client found me. They were looking for someone to write for a new blog. Working for this client introduced me to new software, such as Slack. As they were in the process of starting a blog and working out a social media strategy, I learned a lot from them – also that I find work Christmas parties excruciating.
Then the role of Content Manager came up at SENSE and I decided to volunteer for that. It seemed like a fun idea to do what the client had been doing and start a blog and devise a social media strategy. I did a lot of research into planning tools and discovered Trello, which I hadn’t heard of before. In the role, I also learned how to use SENSE’s Content Management System (CMS) to post content to the website, and Hootsuite to schedule and post social media content.
Then a contact of mine who was a translator at Leiden University and whom I regularly meet for lunch told me she was retiring and that I should apply for the job. I was quite happy as a freelancer but decided that after 12 years it might be a good idea to try something new. I decided to see applying for the job as a good opportunity to dust off my CV and experience the delights of telling strangers about my strengths and weaknesses. Even if I didn’t get the job, the experience of going through a job interview would be worth it.
Without volunteering for SENSE and working for the new client, I wouldn’t have matched the job profile, as they were looking for someone who not only had experience as a translator but could also work in a team and had experience using a CMS and social media. In the second interview, the big boss said her idea of a freelance translator was of an otherworldly being wafting around in a garret. I explained that I worked to deadlines and had little time to waft, and could also show that through my SENSE work I had contact with other human beings – albeit otherworldly translators and editors – and had been leading a team. This, and being able to show that I’d been working on my professional development by attending workshops and courses, helped me convince her that I was reliable, serious and not at all flighty.
The CMS experience I gained volunteering for SENSE meant I soon got the hang of the University’s CMS system that I post my finished translations in. The social media experience has also come in useful because I regularly post to the University’s English Twitter account and use Hootsuite and Trello to plan the content.
