Tactics for Global Health Job Hunting

(photo credit: Axel-D)

Global health jobs come and go. Many of them are dependent on donor funding - funding that ends. Projects therefore have a life cycle, and when your project cycles down, you end up looking for work again. I once walked around the Global Health Council exhibit hall, and realized I had applied for jobs with ninety percent of the organizations represented.

After a while, though, you develop your job hunting plan of attack and stick to it every time you hit the job hunt stage. Here's what I do:

• I talk to my current employer. Just because my project is ending doesn't mean that my organization will vanish. Staying with the current employer and changing projects is very comfortable thing to do. And while it might seem obvious, your employer may not know you want to stay with them. So I always tell HQ that I would like to be moved to a new project if that's possible.
• I start looking for my next job six months in advance. This minimizes your possible unemployment period. It takes a long time to start getting responses to job applications, and it's The risk is that you'll be applying to jobs that want you to start sooner than you can, but you can weed those out in the interviews.
• I tell everyone I know that I am job hunting. That's one advantage to talking to my employer first. If they can't put me on another project, then they can't really complain that I'm looking for something else. Since global health is full of alliances and partnerships, at any given time I'm working with colleagues from a dozen different organizations. Colleagues who know what my work is like because they're, well, colleagues. They are a great resource for finding work.