Join SPP for this semester's series of research seminars.
Speaker: Femida Handy, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract:
The link between volunteer behaviors and sector of employment remains understudied. Extant literature broadly falls into two categories: (1) research on volunteering’s ability to improve job prospects for the unemployed and (2) research on individuals’ prosocial behaviors; where the latter holds significant overlap with public administration’s work on public service motivation. This study adds to this literature by hypothesizing that early-career volunteering serves as a pathway for mid-career nonprofit and public sector employment. This relationship is investigated through logistic regression and duration analysis using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort between 1997 and 2019. Results show that millennials with early-career volunteering are significantly more likely to report mid-career employment in the nonprofit sector, even when controlling for a robust collection of demographic and market factors. Furthermore, millennials with no work experience in the nonprofit sector before their mid-career demonstrate a faster rate of entry into a nonprofit job if they volunteered early in their careers. Interestingly, a relationship between early-life volunteering and mid-career sector of employment is not seen for individuals in the government sphere, suggesting important caveats to the public service motivation literature.