Global Health Jobs: How Do You Stay a Generalist?
Question:
I noticed in your bio, you mention that you consider yourself to be a generalist. What exactly was the mechanism by which you managed to resist the impetus/forces/urge to specialize? Was it simply a matter of paying your dues in public health until you were senior enough to request a broader portfolio? Did you dabble in non-Public Health things around the edges of your Public Health work, or as 'extracurricular' activities, and ultimately convince supervisors to let those be a larger part of your work? Were you very fortunate and just able to use your Public Health degree to get your foot in the door, while actually doing generalists' work from the beginning? Or yet another possibility?
Answer:
In the early part of my career, I focused on remaining a public health generalist, not an overall generalist. I just stayed a public health person, not a reproductive health person, a behavior change specialist, a health financing guru, or whatever. I did that by changing jobs fairly often, by always taking on new work when it was offered to me, and expressing my interest in moving into management. You get a reputation within your organization, and I got to be known as a writer and a manager, so it took me interesting places.
Once I became a somewhat senior manager, it was fairly easy to branch back out into other things besides health, because people figure you can manage anything development-related if you have the skills. The other thing that helped was having a regional focus - Central Asia and the Middle East - so I had selling points beyond health skills.
At the moment, my main focus is on monitoring and evaluation of health efforts, and I feel like range of different health jobs has given me a really useful sense of where M&E fits into good programs.
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