For someone burned out by a soulless corporate job, the switch to a career with more meaning often starts with going back to school for a master’s degree. A Seattle-based company offers a quicker option: a new six-month long program that includes a custom-designed overseas trip to work with a social enterprise and gain direct, high-level experience.

People want jobs that feel like they have an impact.

“The core is that learning happens through experience,” says Mark Horoszowski, co-founder of MovingWorlds, which launched the new MovingWorlds Institute today. “When employers are skimming a resume, they’re not looking for degrees, they’re looking to say has this person really ever worked on monitoring and evaluation, or ever led a new tech launch or innovation.”

MovingWorlds’ “experteering” programs connect professionals with highly skilled volunteer gigs. It started as a way to help social enterprises access the talent they needed, whether that’s related to business strategy or marketing. But the organization quickly realized that expert-level volunteering was also a way to help volunteers gain valuable experience themselves.

In partnerships with companies like Microsoft, MovingWorlds has helped connect employees with “experteering” gigs in other countries as an employee development program.

A UX designer at one company, for example, wanted a promotion to a manager role, but the structure of the company wasn’t giving her a chance to gain the experience she needed. By taking a short break to work in Guatemala–where she helped lead the development of a new e-commerce platform for a social enterprise–she was able to build the case for her promotion back at her job.

The new MovingWorlds Institute is focused around the same type of skill-building project, which can last from three to 16 weeks. But it also includes a longer program that offers training in skills like design thinking, then connects participants with industry mentors and helps them use the new project to find a new job.

“You have people that are very specific: ‘I want a job at Gates Foundation,’ ‘I want a job at Kiva,’ but they just have no field experience.”

“We give them coaching to talk about it in a way that will help them transition their careers,” says Horoszowski.