When you don’t have that much experience it's important to sell yourself to that employer. Say what you can contribute to the organization. Because even if it’s an unpaid internship, they still have to allocate resources. They still have to train you. It's time-consuming and they have to make sure it’s worth their time. The post-secondary campaign is launched each year in September. You’re invited to write an exam, which is three components. They want to make sure they are recruiting people with excellent judgement. It’s not about your knowledge, whether you studied engineering, or were a doctor and now want to be a foreign service officer; it doesn’t matter what background you have, because it’s based on situational questions versus knowledge-based questions. The department is always looking for people who speak Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese—those languages that require a lot of language training. So, for those that have those languages, they are definitely an asset. For me, when I did the interview [to become a foreign service officer] the second time around, I was working in Tunisia for the UN. So, that was an asset because I was actually living abroad. All the international experience proves you’re ready to go anywhere, and you can live in challenging environments. I actually quit my job at the Department of Foreign Affairs as a term employee to take this experience at the UN. And that’s a decision I made that I thought would open more doors to me. In a short period of time, I’ve had four managers and four different experiences. So it’s not for everybody. You always have to start over, and every time it’s a bit scary. A lot of people are interested in international relations questions and issues. But they really have to ask themselves if they’re just interested in working on that within Canada or if they are actually willing to relocate, because it takes a different type of personality. It’s nice to have an area of expertise.  But we are such a small foreign service, as opposed to France or the UK, that we’re also looking for people who are generalists. People who are willing to move from one region to another, who speak Mandarin (for example) but are willing to learn Spanish. It’s better for your career to develop many areas of expertise and to sell yourself as someone who is adaptable and willing to work in different countries, as opposed to one area.

One of the big things you learn in engineering, after four years of cramming for exams and having all these labs to do, is that you learn how to learn new things. That’s the biggest skill that transfers over. Every day I’m asked to look into things that are new to me—but I’ve been in that place before. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. And, when you don’t know the answer, don’t give a BS answer, to avoid looking bad in front of others—that snowballs into people not wanting to ask questions when they don’t know something. So, one of my biggest tips to succeed is just to be honest about what you know and what you don’t know. The Dutch are super nice people and super great, but it will always be better if you learn Dutch. There are lots of people that I would see here and there, and speak to in English, but in the past six months that I’ve been learning Dutch and speaking to those same people—they’re like whole new people. They have better conversations, they make jokes, and I don’t feel like there’s this timer that after 15 minutes they don’t want to keep talking. That Monday after the interview, I sent him an email with three solved puzzles and said, “ It didn’t go as well as planned [during the interview] last Friday, I hope this makes up for it.” He really liked that I did that, and that’s how I got the job. A bit of perseverance.

After you find a job you think you would be interesting, you then have to look at what subject area it’s in. In international development, there are a whole bunch of different fields. Some would be health, education, disaster relief, and procurement; these are all specialist areas that you will eventually need to pick from and build skills in. A willingness to put in more than what’s expected is a key component of a good international development worker. The nature of our work demands it. Working in this industry is a privilege, and you have to treat it as such. And have some reverence for the work you’re doing. Apply personal time to bolster the skills that you have. Here at the UN, it’s common to find people speaking six or seven languages—and that’s not just from taking a couple of university courses, it’s about added effort. It’s about going out and actually improving skills you want to develop, and applying them. It doesn’t have to be languages. Things like web design, programming—even something as simple as brushing up on your Excel skills—these are things that will really serve to differentiate you and make you a stronger worker. Whenever you’re coming in as a newcomer, your contributions are less important than what everybody else has already been doing. It’s your job to go in there, and integrate into the office as if you were a cog in the wider machine. It’s common for people new to the international development world to come and try to do as much as they can as quickly as they can. And it seems like that would be a good idea, but actually, when you look closer, it’s a much better strategy to actually align yourself with the priorities of the office.

Diane Tisdall lives in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, working for World Vision International. She talks to us to about Mongolia’s misconceptions, bundling up for winter, and how to take advantage of Canada’s youth internship programs. Watch her series of videos below.You can also read the interview here.