Community Development: 5 Reasons this Fulfilling Career is Perfect for You

Looking for a job where you can live your values? Believe in empowering people? Find out how to start a rewarding, stable career in community development.

The community sector is broad, and roles for community workers are quite diverse, but they all aspire to create social change and improve the world we live in. As one of the most fascinating parts of the community services sector, community development is two things: an approach, and a profession. You can feel confident that working in this area is a proven way to create deep, long-lasting, sustainable change from the ground up.

Community development an effective approach that’s all about working alongside people in vulnerable communities, and empowering them to improve their own lives and help themselves. Building resilient communities enables us to support each other, to band together in hard times, and to grow into a better society.

Here are five reasons why you should get into this brilliant, fulfilling field.

When it comes to communities, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. For that reason, there’s no one set of steps to follow when working in community development. Instead, you’ll take a community-led approach, with these principles as your guiding star:

Sources: International Association for Community Development & What is community development? | Child Family Community Australia

Do you feel a calling to make the world a better place? We all need to work to survive, but what if you want more from life than the typical nine to five? Finding a job that makes a difference and fulfils you can be tough.

Especially if you dread being stuck in an office, chained to a desk, and you’d rather be out there, actually talking to people and making things happen — and you want something you can get stuck into now, rather than after years of rigorous study.

Community development is a sensitive and supportive approach to working with communities. It aims to create a fairer, more inclusive society by getting to the root causes of unfair disadvantages and thinking long-term.

Community development aims to enable people to create positive social changes in their communities through education, resourcing, and relationship building.

It’s based on the idea that the best way to make a difference is to empower people to help themselves. Research has shown that, across the world, the most effective development projects heavily involve the community in all stages.

So, you get the best of both worlds: directly helping real people in local communities, while also driving deep, long-lasting change.

When we talk about communities, it can refer to:

Community development is a ‘bottom-up’ approach, which means that projects are designed and carried out by people in the community, rather than outside ‘experts’. This means more than just consulting with community members: it means that a project is initiated, led and carried out by the community members themselves.

In community development, you must approach each situation differently, and work with community members to find out what matters to them, and then support them to make it happen — rather than deciding what people need, and then delivering it to them.

Australian Institute of Family Studies – CFCA Resource Sheet

Community development is more than just a job: it’s a calling, and it takes someone with an abundance of warmth and empathy. If you’re a people person with a passion for justice and helping others, you will thrive in this role.

As a community development professional, your aim is to empower the community to come together and create the change they want to see. Each community will be different — with different strengths, needs, and problems. Your job is to be a facilitator, helping to identify needs and removing obstacles. During your work with the community, you’ll be there to:

While the terms ‘community development’ and ‘community work’ are sometimes used interchangeably, and sometimes overlap, they are different approaches to engaging with a community. Community development is more long-term and works from the ground up.

Founder and Director
Evolve Group Network and the Community Practitioners Academy

Want to use your career to make a difference, but unsure of what to study? Community development is an excellent place to start. Studying community development can open doors into the community and public sector. It can also lead you to a wide variety of roles you may not have considered – or known existed – before.

In community development, you’ll empower your own career, too, building a versatile skill set that will enable you to follow your interests and take your career anywhere. Study options are flexible and stackable, so you can start off with a low-cost Certificate and upskill once you’ve got a job. And once you’re in this growing sector, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to build a career that truly reflects your values.

A community development approach can apply across many areas of the community and public sectors, including:

Community development workers usually work in:

Types of community development jobs:

As a community development worker, you’ll get a deep understanding of how to organise people, facilitate group conversations, and make things happen. The soft skills you develop while training in community development are worth their weight in gold. 

For instance, the ability to connect with people from different backgrounds is highly sought after across the community sector. But it’s also valued in other sectors too — an ability to communicate and collaborate with many different types of people is crucial to many roles in the business sector, in nonprofits, and in governments.

Employers love seeing community service experience on resumes because it translates so well into many areas of work. This means there are plenty of jobs to choose from where you can apply your skills and experience. 

So if you don’t like one job, or you just need a change of pace, you can apply for a different job without having to do another course or going back to university.

Researchers predict that in the aftermath of the pandemic this industry will come out looking stable. So you don’t need to worry about your job security or wasting your time getting a qualification in this area. Considering that the industry is growing so strongly, you’ll have plenty of job opportunities to choose from.

Community services has been a rapidly expanding industry and the demand for talented workers is only getting higher, which means good job security. The Health Care and Social Assistance industry, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, was the biggest and fastest-growing sector in Australia and was set to add another 250,000 jobs by 2023. 

Over a third of community development workers are in the public sector, working for local councils or government departments. This is a great place to be, with high job security, excellent salary, and benefits – and the knowledge that you’re working for people, not profit.

A qualification isn’t strictly required to get your first job, but it will make you a more attractive candidate. Especially as you move past entry-level roles, you will find that a qualification will pay off, giving you access to better opportunities.

CEO
JustSociale, an ACNC-accredited NGO committed to promoting and protecting online human rights.

Want to get out from behind the desk? While there’s some administration work involved, you’ll be anything but stuck to your chair. Community development involves travelling to communities and talking to lots of different people. Building relationships face-to-face and facilitating meetings are the most crucial parts of the job.

If you want something flexible that can accommodate your future plans, such as starting a family, or making a tree change, community development and community services more broadly could be the perfect fit. Part-time work in this sector is common, with 63% of workers part-time.

Study options are flexible, with many people choosing cost-effective TAFE or VET courses. You can also use these qualifications as a pathway into university.

Amy is working full-time but wants to shift into the community services sector, with an aim to work in community development. She gets started with an online Certificate III, which she completes on nights or weekends over a few months. This allows her to hit the ground running in her first role, in which she gets further on-the-job training.

Then, she finds that she is enjoying the work. She sees that there’s an opportunity to progress into more senior roles, but she’ll need more advanced knowledge and training. She uses her qualification as a springboard into a bachelor’s degree.

She talks to the course advisor and gets RPL (recognition of prior learning). This means that her degree is shorter and more affordable, and she continues to study part-time whilst working in the industry.

Some relevant TAFE qualifications for this role include:

As a profession that seeks to help people help themselves, community development is a rewarding, meaningful career. Studying community development opens up myriad opportunities and broadens your horizons. If you’ve been wanting to make a change and make a difference, this could be the path you’ve been looking for.

Take the first, small step towards a bright new future by browsing community services courses today.