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Anthony Fee1, Peter Devereux2, Cliff Allum3, and Phoebe Everingham4
1University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia, 2Murdoch University, WA, Australia, 3University of Birmingham, UK, 4Macquarie University, NSW, Australia
Research on international volunteering has long reported on the complex motivations volunteers bring to their international assignments (e.g., Meneghini, 2016). Yet these studies rarely consider how the decision to volunteer fits within the broader sweep of volunteers’ careers – particularly when volunteers are highly skilled professionals and when the decision to volunteer introduces substantial opportunity costs, including financial compromises and professional and personal disruptions. Why do skilled professionals accept long-term assignments as international development volunteers (IDVs) that interrupt, or set back, their career trajectories? And how do they reconcile the costs and benefits of volunteering from a career perspective?
Our study of fifty highly skilled Australian IDVs examined these questions by exploring how career and altruistic motives intersect in volunteers’ decisions to serve abroad. Research shows that volunteers whose personal needs are fulfilled report higher satisfaction, remain engaged for longer, and are more effective in achieving development outcomes during their assignments (Nencini et al., 2016). Thus, these dynamics are of interest to organisations and communities that host volunteers, as well as to the international volunteer cooperation organisations (IVCOs) that recruit, place, and support volunteers.
Several of our findings break new ground in understanding IDVs’ motivations. Almost all the volunteers in our study described being at a professional transition point when they commenced their assignment: entering the workforce, reconsidering their career direction, seeking renewal, or closing a professional chapter. Their assignment was rarely viewed as a one-off career hiatus. Instead, the participants’ narratives were characterised by a deliberate attempt to integrate their professional capability with prosocial work that they hoped to continue after their assignment. The decision to volunteer, therefore, had altruistic and strategic goals – a means of entwining their professional capability with a (more) meaningful career that would extend well beyond the assignment’s duration.
This finding challenges prior portrayals of IDV as either a “meaningful career break” (Meneghini, 2016) or a setting in which altruistic and career motivations exist in tension or simply coexist (Okabe et al., 2019). For most of the volunteers in our study, the two were inseparable. This finding suggests that professionals across career stages view volunteering as part of a longer-term project: constructing careers imbued with purpose and meaning. For many, volunteering was less about stepping away from work and more about redefining what their work and/or career should stand for.
At the same time, clear differences emerged across volunteers’ narratives, broadly linked to career stage and professional circumstances. Six broad volunteer profiles captured these differences and the distinct ways that career considerations and altruistic motives were connected:
- Launchers were recent graduates using volunteering to establish a foothold in international development work and so integrate their prosocial motivations into a career in the sector their viewed as meaningful.
- Enhancers sought to take advantage of the professional opportunities in the role or its context and so advance their existing careers into more senior positions or new and meaningful contexts unavailable elsewhere.
- Career Breakers pursued a temporary but meaningful interlude from a career that may be returned to but which, at the time, was not providing meaning or fulfilling their professional needs.
- Transitioners used their assignments to test or move into a new sector that they believed was better aligned with their values and so would provide more meaning.
- Imposed Transitioners were seeking a meaningful alternative to domestic work – and in the process exploring more meaningful career pathways – after experiencing redundancy or underemployment.
- Veterans were semi- or fully-retired professionals. They viewed volunteering as an opportunity to extend and share their professional expertise in ways that they felt were meaningful.
The different manifestations of the interdependencies between self-interest and service, which we refer to as the individual-altruism nexus, was central to our findings. Volunteers did not describe choosing between professional and prosocial benefit. Instead, they actively sought to weave the two together, seeking to capitalise professionally on their volunteer experiences while deepening their commitment to prosocial careers.
These insights carry important implications, particularly at a time when funding for international development is retreating and when calls to professionalise volunteering for development are intensifying. For IVCOs, our findings suggest that recognising and supporting volunteers’ career aspirations may deepen (not dilute) their prosocial contributions. Thus – without detracting from their core developmental priorities – IVCOs would be wise to consider how they can incorporate volunteers’ career interests into key features of their assignment design, recruitment and support.
For example, for many volunteers, especially Launchers and Transitioners, their assignment functioned as a form of socialization to a sector – international development – in which they aspire to work. IVCOs could support this by providing these volunteers opportunities to engage with practitioners, observe work across different organisational levels, or experience multiple local contexts that provide realistic insights into sectoral work. Likewise, Enhancers would benefit from working with host organisations that can offer ‘stretch’ roles and from training that helps them understand and consolidate the informal learning opportunities they experience during an assignment. Enhancers, Imposed Transitioners and Career Breakers are likely to benefit from mechanisms that assist them to retain home-country professional links during their assignments (e.g., facilitating contact with professional associations throughout the assignment). IVCOs could make assignments requiring extensive professional expertise more attractive to Veterans by incorporating features that recognise these volunteers’ experiences and needs, such as tailored health or insurance arrangements or structuring formal ‘mentor’ activities into the role. Used in these ways, the volunteer profiles provide a tentative template to guide volunteer recruitment, design program support, attract a wider range of suitable candidates and, importantly, match volunteer candidates to host-organisations and assignments in which they are likely to thrive.
A further contribution of the study lies in revealing the extent to which prospective volunteers make consequential career decisions based on largely untested assumptions about the value and transferability of IDV experiences. Greater awareness of these perceptions allows IVCOs to more accurately communicate the potential benefits and challenges associated with volunteering, and to consider whether their programs provide realistic previews of careers into which (some) volunteers seek to move, and how they might meter expectations where appropriate. Given the high opportunity costs associated with this type of volunteering, supporting volunteers to navigate these career uncertainties before, during, and after their assignments is likely to be valuable.
Click here to read the free full-text article: Fee, A., Devereux, P., Allum, C., & Everingham, P. (2026). Integrating International Development Volunteering With a Meaningful Career: Australian Development Volunteers in the Asia-Pacific. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08997640251386775
Lead author: Anthony.fee@uts.edu.au
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