Volunteer work on a resume

[Anonymous]

Do you list your volunteer activities on your resume? If so, how long do you leave the activities on after you stop doing them? For me, the volunteer work is related to my professional field, so it speaks to my qualifications.

A related question is: how long do you leave activities/jobs from your (late) college years on your resume? I'm 29 and graduated 7 years ago.

[Anonymous]

If you have less than 10 years of experience, your resume should be only one page. The focus should be on your more recent positions and activities related to the job you're applying for. If you're running out of space, drop stuff or shorten the description of older jobs. If the page looks sparce without the older stuff, I'd leave it on. I have volunteer activities at the bottom of my resume and leave it on there until I need he space.

[Anonymous]

It depends.

If the experience is relevant to the position I'm applying for, I keep it in there, right with the rest of the work experience. If it isn't, it doesn't stay on there.

[Anonymous]

I have a small section at the bottom that includes personal activities and voluteerism. I don't use much space, but sometimes these items have helped as an ice-breaker/talking point in interviews. I especially include volunteerism that pertains to my work.

[Anonymous]

OP here. I took the 1st PP's advice and got my resume down to 1 page, and it's much tighter. When it was 1.5 pages, I had volunteer experience through 2012 (no longer current). Because I had to choose between old volunteer experience and beefing up current and recent job experience to get it on one page, I removed the volunteer stuff. Thanks for the push in that direction!

[Anonymous]

I volunteer as a website manager, where I work with CentOS, MySQL, and Apache. Given that I am a Linux sysadmin, this volunteer work is most certainly relevant, and I include it.