Will moving to administration hurt my nonprofit career?
Taking a desk job is tempting when you feel stagnant after a year of unsuccessful applications and are tired of dealing with the public. However, transitioning into administration creates the fear that it will be too hard to return to advocacy or nonprofit program work in the future.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Staying on toes, taking feedback well, and being helpful without being a doormatDid this help you?
- 2Highlighting past administrative experience on a resume instead of recent customer-facing rolesDid this help you?
- 3Applying to back-office roles at larger companies within the same industryDid this help you?
- 4Tweaking resume job titles to better match office roles and pass automated scannersDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I’m worried that transitioning into administration could make it harder to return to advocacy or nonprofit program work in the future.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How do I switch from old sysadmin stuff to IaC?
- 8How do you transition out of a generalist IT management role?
- 2How to move from nonprofit back-end operations into frontline fundraising
- 14How to transition from technical work to management with no background
- 22Why is project management just doing admin and updating trackers?
- 8How to transition from corporate to nonprofit work