Mark Goldring was prepared for a culture shock when he left university and moved to Borneo to teach English in a remote village in the jungle of Sarawak 30 years ago.

What he had not expected was the even bigger shock that hit him two years later when he completed his VSO posting and came home to take up a career as a lawyer in the UK. He returned to Britain at the height of the Thatcherite revolution to discover that all his left-wing student friends were driving flash cars and working in accountancy. Less than a year later, he returned to international development and did not return to the UK permanently until 1995.

“One of the great ironies is that I began my career as a VSO volunteer, but if I applied to VSO at that stage now I wouldn't get an interview,” he says. “In those days there was a shortage of people with good tertiary education in most developing countries. Now there are plenty of people with graduate-level qualifications in the developing world and what they want from people and organisations like VSO are well developed professional skills.”

Between then and now, the other big change - led by Mr Goldring, who was appointed chief executive of the charity in 1999 after experience with the UN, Oxfam and the Department for International Development, as well as VSO - is in the countries from which volunteers are drawn. The charity first placed Western graduates in developing countries. Today, its volunteers are experienced professionals from across the globe; some countries, such as India, provide expert volunteers in some fields and receive them in others.

Part of this change is practical - “The number of people in the UK who know about tropical agriculture is quite small, yet the number of Kenyans who know about it is considerable” - and part is ideological. “In the former colonial countries with a real history of the white foreigner thinking that they know the answers, that sense of sharing and learning is a very powerful change in the message,” he says.

As changes go, Mr Goldring's own decision to leave international development and move to Mencap, which supports people with learning disabilities, might initially seem rather strange, but he argues that there is an underlying similarity in what the two organ-isations do. “They are both about rights and justice,” he says. “It's about the most marginalised people and what we can do to help them to run their lives most effectively.”

One of the other obvious connections is that both are being affected by the recession. Financial and job insecurity are making potential UK-based volunteers more wary of leaving the job market here to work overseas with VSO, while pension changes mean that there are fewer people who retire early. Equally, one of the first challenges that Mr Goldring expects to confront with Mencap is simply holding services together in the face of the economic unpleasantness. “The first job is to protect what we are offering to people we are working with today,” he says. “When you have councils that are short of money, if they can screw the last few pence out of a contract, they have to try to do that.”

At the moment, Mencap relies heavily on the money it gets for delivering services on behalf of health, education and social services departments. Mr Goldring wants to look at additional funding options so that in the future the charity will have the money to pay for - or at least lobby for - services that the public sector will not cover. Looking even farther into his own future is not unlike looking back in time; he plans to end his career as it started. He and his wife, whom he met when they were volunteering abroad, have promised each other that they will both take on VSO placements when their teenaged children have grown up.

The lowdown

Who Mark Goldring, the outgoing chief executive of VSO and incoming chief executive of Mencap. He started in his new role this week

What VSO is an international development charity; Mencap is a charity for people with learning disabilities

When Mr Goldring left VSO last week and started work at Mencap on Monday

Where Kenya. He was determined to stay on at VSO until the end of last week so that he could attend the charity's first international board meeting

Why “VSO used to be a British organisation that worked overseas. It is now an international organisation that moves people from where they are interested and available to where they are needed. A VSO volunteer now is just as likely to be a Filipino oran Indian as to be British,” Mr Goldring says

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