When Volunteerability Intersects Employability: A Conceptual Typology of Occupation-Related Volunteering and Opportunities for Volunteering Research

This paper presents a typology of occupation-related volunteering where an individual’s occupational competencies and resources underpin their volunteering. Their occupation is the key to employability’s occupational competencies and resources intersecting volunteerability’s availability, willingness, and ability to volunteer (see Meijs et al. in Voluntary Action 8:36–54, 2006). It theorizes the intersection as occupation-related volunteering (Biermann et al. in SAGE Open, 14:1–24, 2024). The typology’s two dimensions capture employment and volunteering practices across all work-life stages and create five explanatory types of occupation-related volunteering: self-facilitated Occupational Volunteering and Occupational Development Volunteering and the employer-facilitated Occupational Bestowing, Senpage Service, and Occupational HR Development. The conceptualization captures employability intersecting volunteerability due to the underlying, often prerequisite, occupation and caters to cultural and organizational diversity in praxis and theory. It synthesizes and reorganizes cross-disciplinary knowledge, creating concepts and language to encourage a volunteering-specific research approach. The typology and the research lenses of “becoming, doing, and relating” to one’s occupation (Anteby et al. in Academy of Management Annals 10:183–244, 2016) combine to prompt empirical volunteering research with suggested questions about the praxis, practices, and practitioners of occupation-related volunteering.