Finding a Job in the Field: In Through the Back Door

Over the next three days, will be running a series looking at how to get a job in the field.  The posts were written by Transitionland, a woman with a human rights and development background trying to break into international aid work.

As for background - Transitionland has spent the last five years as a volunteer, intern, fellow, and junior employee in various human rights and humanitarian organizations in the States and abroad.  She is currently continuing a decade-long obsession with Afghanistan and is passionate about refugee issues.  She also writes the phenomenal Transitionland blog.

Hello, Humanitarian Relief readers.

If you're like me, you're looking for a job in the field of humanitarian assistance and it's proving way more difficult than you expected it to be. War, poverty and oppression haven't gone away, but the aid world (and the NGO world more broadly) has been hit by the global economic downturn, so organizations aren't hiring as many people as they were even a year ago. The path to stable, decent-paying employment at this time is a long and uneven one.

This is my first post in a series on my search for a job as an aid worker.

Well, actually, this post will be on something I can safely say I know how to do well, and receive emails about on a regular basis: finding an internship.

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to lump internships at humanitarian, development and human rights organizations together. In professional life, people cycle between these anyway, because the objectives of human rights, humanitarian and development work often (though not always) intersect.

The Internship, Your First Step:

The bad news: the recession and the Madoff scheme have badly hurt the budgets of many organizations, and there are more entry-level positions being eliminated than created.

The sort-of-good news: there are more internships than before, because it's cheaper to hire even four paid interns than to pay the salary one full employee, and there's still as much work to be done as ever.

(I will touch on paid vs. unpaid internships later on.)

Landing an internship with an organization won't guarantee you future employment there –many people mistakenly think this is the case— but it will;

• Give you experience actually doing the work you want to do

• Quickly teach you whether this is really the path you want to take

• Build your resume

• Provide you with lots of useful connections for future job-hunting

Part two is here, and part three is here.

For more information on finding a job in the field, also check out this earlier post on the topic.

[Photo from the Afghan Embassy in DC]