Careers

A semi-definitive guide

By Alanna Shaikh | | 3 Comments |

This post is now obsolete. I get so many career questions, I have moved it all over to the International Development Careers List and my paid consulting.

American culture is such that I don’t even really like writing this post. But I am starting to get deluged with requests for assistance, and I just don’t have the time to answer them. I have a mortgage to pay and a family to feed – however much I’d like to, I can’t devote my whole life to pro bono work.

This, therefore, is my semi-definitive guide to what I will do as part of my commitment to service, and what falls into consulting work and thus requires pay. Please note that unpaid work depends on me having the time to do it, and therefore may take longer or be refused.

Career Coaching

Service
• Answering any question general enough I can also post it to my blog
• One phone call on any topic
• Any number of emails that are easy for me to answer from my own experience
• Taking a look at a resume and indentifying obvious flaws

Consulting
• Detailed resume review and commentary
• Resume editing
• Advice about what employers are good to work for and what aren’t (because I will not do this in writing, I can’t blog about it)
• Practice interviews
• More than one phone call

Social Media Advising

Service
• Social media audit, including quick recommendations for what could be improved
• Scan of organizational blog and suggestions for improvement
• Guest posting to your blog

Consulting
• Social media audit, with detailed analysis of strengths and weaknesses
• Design of social media plan
• Blog planning, writing, editing, or management
• Social media training

Technical Assistance on Health and Development

Service
• Read proposal and provide general impression
• Suggest resources for learning more about a topic
• Any question I can answer on Twitter
• Helping individual moms with breastfeeding

Consulting
• Technical input into proposal design or evaluation
• Proposal writing or editing
• Training of any kind (except as previously mentioned)

Other random things I think of as service
• Board membership (though I am very picky about what boards I join)
• Speeches
• Providing references

In a nutshell – if you need specific, detailed guidance that takes time to produce, that is paid work. So would anything that requires me to be quoted on the record and/or shift from informal to formal, any communication which requires multiple phone calls, and questions that require research for me to answer or that I find boring.

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(photo credit: Sokwanele – Zimbabwe)
Chosen because writing about this makes me kind of uncomfortable, and somehow featuring Zimbawean currency made me feel better.

Four bosses I have known and loved

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |

1) The one who spoke fluent Russian and, when we traveled for work, used to negotiate with waitresses extensively to make sure I got my eggs the way I liked them.

2) The one who cared so much about our programs that she’d start swearing and waving her arms in the middle of meetings.

3) The one who would yell at me when he got stressed, but always grinned if I yelled back.

4) The one who was technically my subordinate but acted like my boss because he ran a really important country program. Why was he loved, you ask? Because he ran his really important country program really really well.

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(photo credit: Bright Tal)
Chosen because four boxes sounds kind of like four bosses, and I loved the picture.

This job is not always fun

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |


There are an awful lot of good things about a career in international relief or development. You accumulate great stories for parties, you sound cool as all get-out at high school reunions, and you have a valid reason to get extra pages in your passport. Plus, you know – you do meaningful work that you care about in amazing parts of the world. Based on the email I get, it’s a field lots of people want to get into.

For contrast, here are three things that suck:

1) You’re always understaffed. Pressure to keep overhead costs low means that you never, ever have enough people to do the work you are supposed to be doing. This means working overtime for free, or doing your work badly. Sometimes it means both working free overtime and doing things badly.

2) You know you’re a drop in the bucket. Actually doing something to solve global problems brings you face to face with the complicated and painful nature of global problems. It’s a whole lot easier to feel miserable about Somalia and then donate a lot of money to WFP than it is to be in Somalia and run a food program. Giving money to the organization of your choice feels like you are doing something with impact; working for that same organization will often feel completely futile. Perspective is not always a good thing.

3) You’re a bureaucrat. An awful lot of every expat’s job involves paperwork. Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.

(photo credit: pondspider)

What should I study if I want a career in international development?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 6 Comments |


You can go two ways on this (at least) and it depends on your basic skills and aptitude.

The first option is acquiring some hard skills. Engineering, nursing, IT, and teaching or training are good examples. An appropriate terminal degree, combined with a minor in a foreign language (not French or Spanish unless you can become fluent. Turkish and Urdu are good choices for poor language learners as they are a little easier to learn and yet are exotic enough that no one expects fluency. If you’re good with languages, go with one of the major difficult ones – Russian, Arabic, or Mandarin Chinese) or international relations will open a lot of doors.

The second option is to study international development and/or its related disciplines. This will require a graduate degree and it covers a lot of different study options; I’d include international or public health, public policy, conflict studies, “development studies” and the big one, development economics. The trick to this path is that it can be very hard to go abroad with these kinds of degrees, because you’re not really doing anything a development project needs in the field. You run the risk of getting tracked into headquarters-based jobs – academia or think tank if you’re lucky, program backstopping if you’re not so lucky. The best way to mitigate that risk is to acquire whatever hard skills you can (grantwriting is a good one) while in school, and intern as much as humanly possible. Abroad if you can, of course.

Anyone want to talk about their own study and where it led them?

ETA: Ethan Zuckerman commented below and mentioned a big thing I left off – time overseas. If you want a job in the developing world, people will feel a whole lot better if they already know you can hack living there. I talk about this in my Damsels in Success post a bit. One useful thing to say here: STUDY ABROAD. It’s the easiest way to fully immerse yourself in another culture. And choose somewhere tough. Auckland or Paris does not count. I did my own study abroad in Cairo, and I know that employers saw that as clear evidence that I could adapt easily in other places. (And they’re right – if you can live in downtown Cairo, you can live almost anywhere.)

(photo credit: clarkstown67)

Reader Question – International Social Work

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

Dear Alanna,

I have one main question: from your experience, what would you say the need for international social workers is in NGOs?

Background info: I have an MA in international and I work for a NGO in the US, in their Africa dept – as a program associate, so I don’t go to Africa. I am going to go to (redacted) for a bit more than 3 months in September and will volunteer in a hospital that treats raped women. I know 3 months is not nearly enough to give me credibility, but that’s all I can do.

Now I’m thinking about going back to school. I am leaning towards a MSW that would allow me to focus on mental health and trauma. Do you think this would be valued in the NGO world?

Sincerely,

Katherine

 

Dear Katherine,

International social workers in NGOs – it’s a tricky question. There is a tremendous need for psychosocial help for survivors of disasters, and NGOs are paying more and more attention to those needs. International Medical Corps has some useful links: http://www.imcworldwide.org/content/media/detail/1379/. A social work background would fit in nicely and meet a need.

That being said, everyone I actually know with an MSW who works in international development is doing something unrelated. It ends up being treated as just another master’s degree – a credential for a job that requires that level of education, but not a set of technical skills that are actually used in daily practice. Since you already have a master’s degree, I am not sure what the value added would be for you.

Your best bet might be to spend a year or two doing other things to build your skills and background on trauma and mental health. Your volunteering is a great start. Maybe you could also volunteer with trauma victims when you come back to the US? I know the DC Rape Crisis Center will train people to be advocates and answer their hotline. There must be other opportunities as well. You can put that kind of thing on your resume and frame yourself as having the right background and then start applying for the jobs that you feel passionate about.

Here’s an obvious thing, but just in case you have not thought of it – have you searched idealist.org or a similar site to see what jobs require an MSW, and if they interest you?

Best,

Alanna

Answering my first reader question

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |

I’ve got my first question to answer (and it’s not what I would have expected):

Q: I am moving to [redacted] in about a month, to work as a coordinator for a large NGO on a refugee project. It’s a one-year contract. This is my first field posting, and I really have no idea what to pack. I have no shipping allowance, just what I can carry in my checked luggage. I know what to do about clothing and toiletries and whatever. My question is – what about books? How many books should I pack? I don’t want run out of stuff to read but I do need some space for clothes.

A: Bring about a week’s worth of books, whatever that is for you. Chose things you can re-read, but you won’t mind giving away. You’re going to a major city. You’ll be able to get internet access, and probably satellite TV. You won’t die of boredom if you run out of books, and sharing and discussing English language books is a great way to make friends with other expats. (And if you want to stay sane in a new culture, you’ll need a couple expat friends.)

The Art of the Layoff

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

Guy Kawasaki on the art of the layoff. Layoffs are a part of life when you work for a donor-funded project. Funding typically tapers up and then tapers back down and staffing shifts accordingly. It hurts to work the end of a project, and watch all your colleagues leave. It’s lonely, and especially lonely if you’re the boss doing the layoffs.

Guy Kawasaki offers some great advice here on how to do layoffs well. He’s though this through in excellent detail, and I recommend the article to anyone who has to do staff cuts. Point #6, share the pain, is especially impressive to me. I had a boss refuse his annual raise because staff were being laid off, and it really made a difference to how people felt.

I do agree with his sole commenter, though. If it is a not-for-cause layoff, let people have a day or two more at work to say goodbye to their colleagues. I was fired once and the hardest part for the colleagues I left behind was having no idea what happened to me or why I was let go. One of them found my home number (this was back before cellphones) and tracked me down, just for closure. An NGO is unlikely to have much proprietary data to be stolen, and some staff members may want to do some handover.