IELTS கேட்டல் பகுதி 2 பயிற்சித் தேர்வு கேள்விகள்

Okay, my talk is about a research study I carried out over a period of five years on long term volunteer retention, why some people keep working with conservation organisations year after year, while others give up after only a few months. As coordinators, you know that volunteers can respond very differently to the same conditions. One rainy weekend on a difficult site might make one person leave the programme, while another might overcome serious obstacles to stay involved year after year. I was particularly interested in this second group, the ones with strong retention.

What I decided to do was design a research study using a sample of long term volunteers from our network, 295 in all, who had already stayed the course pretty well. The sample was drawn from a wide range of ages, but there was deliberately a significant number of mature volunteers, and all respondents were living at home in the local region. I wanted that element of consistency, rather than having some respondents commuting from outside the area or staying in temporary accommodation. The sample still included wide variation in the type of conservation organisation people volunteered for, and in their home backgrounds, to reflect the wider volunteer base.

So I designed questionnaires to elicit what their concerns had been when they first started, and what had sustained them in the years that followed. The early findings indicated that initial worries varied widely. Younger volunteers tended to focus on time constraints and on whether the work would interfere with their studies; financial concerns were less prominent than I had expected. But mature volunteers with families tended to emphasise uncertainties about effects on their family life, and that came through more strongly than any other concern in the older group.

With those starting concerns established, another section of the questionnaire looked at retention in terms of social and environmental factors, other factors, and intrinsic or personal characteristics, with participants indicating how strongly each factor had influenced them.

Among the influences participants described as most important, for social factors, many respondents said how crucial it had been to have effective support, though there was no one specific source. It could be family, friends, or other volunteers. As for other factors, volunteers were heartened not so much by external praise, but by what they regarded as a perceived sense of purpose in the work itself. And for personal characteristics, many respondents reported that they took pleasure in spending time outdoors, and the enjoyment of the outdoors was regarded as very significant.

As for the influences given moderate importance, a sizable percentage in the social and environmental category talked about positive experiences at camp earlier in their lives. Childhood summers spent at outdoor camp had given them a foundational love of nature that pulled them back to conservation work as adults. For other factors, a number of people said that what was of most importance was good fitness; this had a fairly strong influence on persistence, since the work itself can be physically demanding. For personal characteristics, there were quite a large percentage of respondents who mentioned they felt it was important to have many hobbies in their daily life. That gave them a depth and sense of perspective.

The lower ranked influences included, under social factors, coordinators who listened carefully and made them feel that the team leaders cared. For other factors, they mentioned the lack or absence of any major problems in their families. For personal characteristics, they identified an ability to juggle several roles at once, what we might call their capacity for multi tasking.

These findings help inform the design of the new induction programme I mentioned earlier. But in addition, a number of further recommendations have emerged.

On the basis of that, I propose that the network distributes questionnaires to first year volunteers to help us get an idea of their level of commitment when starting their work. This is our overriding concern, knowing in advance who is most at risk of dropping out.

I also recommend that we look into ways of offering induction courses for some selected volunteers to allow them to take on the role of mentors. Experienced volunteers are the best people for this role, because they have already lived through the early difficulties themselves during the first months of volunteering. This policy will make support much more accessible to newer volunteers.

This help is often most needed in the evening and at night, when our offices are already closed. So we should set up remote help, phone and video lines that volunteers can use from home, supplementing rather than replacing the face to face advice they get on site. Research has shown that remote services are actually more accessible to the majority of volunteers in our region.