Can you recommend a volunteer position focused on program management?

Q. I’m a clinical social worker with 15 years of experience in direct service. I have a master’s degree, and a broad range of experience in health care, working with elderly people, the homeless, and disadvantaged children. I would like to work in program management for a charity. I realize that volunteering is the best route to the kind of job I seek, but can you offer advice on finding a volunteer spot that will truly make use of my experience?

A. Volunteering may not actually be the best or only route to the kind of management job you’re describing, says C.T. O’Donnell, president of KidsPeace a national nonprofit organization in New York that provides services and residential treatment to children with mental and behavioral problems.

While volunteering can get your foot in the door and help you better understand a charity’s mission, says Mr. O’Donnell, you’ll need more training in management before you can become a successful program manager. Thus, he recommends that you go back to school for your master’s in business administration.

“In the nonprofit world, management aspirations require layering business skills on top of human-services skills and passions,” he says.

Indeed, making the transition to program management from direct service isn’t easy, says Barry Antos, senior vice president of the behavioral health division of Pioneer Human Services, in Seattle, which provides job training, counseling, housing, and drug treatment to needy clients. Former social workers may miss the personal contact they had with clients, he says.

If you already have some clinical supervisory experience, your understanding of how to provide guidance and coaching to a professional staff will certainly help you make the transition, he says.

But if you’ve never had to oversee others’ work, Mr. Antos strongly recommends finding a volunteer position that gives you that kind of responsibility, either where you currently work or perhaps at a local educational institution that needs someone with your level of clinical experience to help supervise interns just completing a master’s program.

Something that might help you decide if program management is really for you, he suggests, is to first volunteer as a trustee for a charity for which you might like to work.

“As a board member you will become familiar with financial imperatives and operational oversight and gain opportunities to directly observe management operations,” he says. “You’ll also gain connections through other board members and will better understand the dynamics of your potential career choice.”

Your lack of management experience may limit your chance of being hired by a charity right away for a midlevel management spot, says Sanford Otsuji, executive director of the Olive Crest Homes and Services for Abused Children in Santa Ana, Calif.

“At our organization, a person with lots of social-service experience but no management experience would likely start at a coordinator or assistant position to gain the skills required before moving up to the management position,” he says.

Even so, Mr. Otsuji still recommends seeking a junior-level job in the field over just volunteering. “The most effective way to get you on the path to program management is to speak directly with the nonprofit’s human-resources department or the executive directors,” he says. These people, he says, “can best guide you toward your goal of program management within that specific organization.”