Over the past five months I served as the team leader for the 2010 Nonprofit Employment Trends Survey, a research project of the Caster Family Center for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Research.

Nonprofit HR Solutions (a Washington DC based nonprofit human resources consulting firm) approached us to work on this national survey of nonprofit employment practices. I am happy to report that the data we collected is representative of organizations across the nonprofit sector by size, subsector, and location!!

The Caster Center will be hosting a Nonprofit Human Resource Management Symposium to discuss the key findings and implications this data on San Diego area nonprofits. I would like to highlight a few of these key findings here along with my commentary.

1. The nonprofit job market appears to be stabilizing. Nonprofits are starting to recover from the economic downturn and they are planning to hire new staff in the latter part of 2010 into 2011.

2. Nonprofits are doing more with less. As the demand for nonprofit services increases, nonprofits are turning to current employees to get the work done rather than hiring new employees. This is especially the case with smaller organizations. This staffing strategy has potential negative consequences of employee burnout and voluntary turnover.

3. Succession planning continues to be a problem for organizations. For senior and executive level positions, nonprofits are hiring from outside of the organization. This is especially disconcerting for emerging leaders. There are few opportunities for upward mobility within nonprofit organizations and the move out to move up mentality still rings true. (This finding mirrors the NP2020 research)

Click here to access the full report.