I have completely no idea about volunteer work and would like to understand this working culture in NZ a little bit.
I came across one website about volunteering work and I don't understand why there are some IT volunteer work with this requirements:
I don't know how is in NZ, but in Germany volunteer jobs are usually more like social works (e.g. helping in some nursing home, assisting and taking care of old people, social worker at red cross).Proficiency in any of these languages: C# : .Net : PHP : HTML : Javascript : CSS and/or database skills. Because of the nature of the work volunteers undertake with our client organisations, it is essential that you have a very good standard of communication skills; in particular conversational English (including over the phone and in person).
But such highly skilled web development job is usually paid job and if the company doesn't need a full-time employee because e.g. the scope of work is relative small, then it is usually advertised as student job or paid internship.
Most students are very happy to undertake that kind of job, even the salary is not so high but it should be enough to cover students living costs, so that they don't need to ask financial assistant from their parents. Moreover, they can gain some professional experience and earn some money. I did that too when I was student and very happy with my student part time job as programmer. But I have never seen those kind of programming jobs are advertised as volunteer jobs.
Therefore, I am a little bit confused why in NZ it is considered as volunteer job?
What could be the benefits for the candidate to do that?
I have some friends who are engineers and enjoy doing volunteer works as social worker at weekend. That is their social activity and they enjoy to do so.
They meet new people and make new friends. But web development ... I can hardly understand it.