Volunteer is the backbone of any organization and their role cannot be neglected. Caritas India understand it very well and hereby the organization adopted ‘Volunteerism’ as one of her key strategic pillars.

Caritas Asia hosted a series of workshops cum trainings on volunteerism addressing the topic of valuable volunteers, volunteer’s role in humanitarian services, exploring the motivation for volunteering, volunteer sustainability and to facilitate the exchange on the structures, policies and tools for volunteer management. The recent training was three days workshop/ training on how to develop the Core Humanitarian Competency Framework (CHCF) & European Union Aid Volunteer (EUAV) competency domains at Bangkok from 26-28, March 2019 for its Asian member organizations.

The event was facilitated by Birgit Spiewok, Consultant, it was conducted to familiarize the members on the competency framework and inclusion of the same in respective organisations. The workshop started with introduction of each participant. Three days event provided the opportunity for experience exchange, practices and thoughts between the participating organization on how to work with the competency framework in volunteer management. It explained to develop competency-based Human Resource (HR) tools for staff and volunteers, lead a discussion on principles and practices to set up competency frameworks and measure competency by using scales/rating method.

“Competency is a set of behaviours that a person must demonstrate based on underlying knowledge, skill and expertise in order to perform effectively in a given situation”, shared by the Facilitator.

Caritas India, representatives shared about how Caritas India work with volunteers, role of HR and the existing competency-based framework for staffs and volunteers, the other participants from their respective organizations too shared their views on it.

The session dealt (six domain) from CHCF i.e. 1. Understanding the Humanitarian contexts and applying its principles and standards 2. Achieving results 3. Developing & maintaining collaborative relation 4. Operating safely and Securely 5. Pressure management & working in changing environment 6. Leadership demonstration which comes under four- humanitarian competency frameworks i.e.  1. Core humanitarian competency 2. Leadership competency 3. Technical competency and 4. Functional competency.

A detailed discussion was facilitated on competency-based HR Management, HR Cycle, various policies, practices, and procedures while hiring and recruiting the staff and volunteer. It was followed by sharing on guiding principles, tools, competency-based interviews, competency-based group assessment, competency based self-assessment & key to rating it, performance development and competency-based learning and development planning, etc.

Through Group work participants were asked to access themselves based on anyone competency domains and highlight their strength, weaknesses, gaps, future learning priorities. They were given the task to give a rating to self and other people in a group and comment on its self-assessment based on humanitarian work and give the recommendation to fill the gap and weaknesses.

Explaining the ‘Blended learning approach/method’ (70/20/10), facilitator shared that 70% of learning is gained by a person while he works, 20% from others and 10 % by training & workshops.

The competencies-based framework will help in Enhance capacity, improve effectiveness of humanitarian work and assistance to people affected by humanitarian crises. And the learning will undoubtedly further accelerate the professionalism of the humanitarian sector and will contribute to efforts by humanitarian organizations to render effective services to people affected by humanitarian crises in any part of the world.