Overcoming Barriers to Launching an International Development Career

Four common stumbling blocks

In many fields, starting out can be daunting. This goes not only for those who have graduated from university but for more seasoned professionals interested in switching careers.

How do you step onto that first rung of the ladder in the field of international development? Even though unemployment has hit historic lows, and jobs are seemingly plentiful, you don’t want to get onto just any old ladder that’s leaning against a wall — you want to get onto a ladder that will get you over the right wall.

What are the barriers to entry and how can you overcome them? In this post, I’ll take a look at four barriers to launching a career in international development – experience, knowledge, confidence and name recognition – and some things you can do to lower them.

The experience barrier

The experience barrier can be a maddening catch-22. Employers want you to have experience, but how do you gain experience if you haven’t been employed yet? For junior professionals, the experience issue isn’t about the problem-solving skills. It is about whether you’ve done something similar before — even just once — and whether you can deliver the goods.

Through time, this barrier will fade as you build up a body of work. Meanwhile, you need to find creative ways to compensate for your (temporarily) limited experience. If you don’t have professional experience, you may have country experience or language skills from living or studying overseas. Other things that compensate for lack of experience could be your interest in, and commitment to, working in the international development field. Or, better yet, your interest (some call it passion) in a particular issue, whatever it is that keeps you up at night.  

A good way of getting experience is to take field assignments, even volunteer ones. You go to live and work in a country for a period of time, test your mettle, and gain a better sense of how the real world works. This is a great way of gaining a perch on the career ladder, while also learning a new language, and accumulating some marketable practical skills along the way.  I recall a friend saying that even minimal overseas experience helps.  Her international recruiter explained it this way: “Look, we just want to make sure that when you get off the plane you don’t freak out and turn around and come right back. This, unfortunately, has happened more times than we care to admit.”

Being well-spoken, personable, and reliable, possessing good analytical and writing skills are always good attributes to have. You can demonstrate all these things in person and by sharing examples of written work. And while having 20-30 years of experience in one area is highly valued and opens doors, it is, of course, only expected of very senior professionals. For junior professionals, having successfully performed a project once signals to prospective hiring managers or clients that you can be trusted to do it again. There is running a joke at the World Bank, where staff shift between projects and countries at a pretty high frequency, that if you done something once, you can be considered an expert.

The knowledge barrier

If you are a recent graduate, the knowledge you draw on will be mostly theoretical. And much of it may turn out to be only marginally applicable to the work you end up doing.

In the consulting field, technical knowledge relating to a field or a method is what is most valued. Some examples are: rural water supply systems, climate change mitigation, social behavior change, natural resource management, data analytics, governance, and evaluation methodologies.

To build up an area of knowledge, it is advisable not to spread yourself too thinly. Find a niche that interests you, and focus on building up your expertise there. After a while, you may find that the niche area that you chose has a lot of transfer potential, and you can apply it to other sectors. Teach yourself about the economics of forestry. Learn a statistical software program. Follow blogs and podcasts that cover a specific issue.  All of that will make you more marketable. In the meantime, you’re keeping your synapses active.

The confidence barrier

Not having worked in the field yet, and not (yet) having a wide network of experienced friends and colleagues, may make you feel you are at a disadvantage. It may sap your confidence. How can you compete with the professionals you meet? My advice is to be bold. Suppress those misgivings. Hide your nervousness, wear a confident smile. Most people won’t notice your nerves. Remember that all these senior professionals also started out with zero experience at some point.

I know of a young woman who was desperate to get her foot in the door of New York’s high-stakes fashion industry.  Freshly graduated, she cold called a name-brand designer and was told there were no jobs.  “Nevertheless,” as they say, “she persisted.”  By the end of the call, she had wrangled an internship, based on her years as a summer camp counselor, where, she assured them, there was no crisis she couldn’t handle.

And if you are young, remember that you come with distinct advantages. You probably possess some measure of energy, enthusiasm, resilience, intellectual curiosity, and analytical prowess that many of us older folks wish we still had! You also bring tech and social media savvy that you may take for granted, but that may be valued by your employers.

The name recognition barrier

By virtue of being new to the field, you are unknown. You don’t have “name recognition” as they like to say in politics, because no one knows you. Bizarrely enough, we seem to live in an age where name recognition trumps competence, ideas, and even previously unacceptable behavior when it comes to politicians getting elected. The lesson for you, however, is not to see how much you can get away with and still get hired — the lesson is that name recognition is really, really important. 

It is completely normal and understandable that people don’t know who you are. You don’t have a big network yet, or a reputation. Maybe it’s going too far to say that this is an existential barrier, but before they can consider hiring you, people simply need to know that you exist…

That means finding as many opportunities as you can handle to meet people and get your CV out there in the public domain where organizations and people can find it. Devex, Developmentaid.org, Assortis.org, are some of the bigger sites in the development field (and LinkedIn works, too) where you can post your CV and profile and where employers can find you. In addition, many consulting firms invite people to upload their profile and CV, which they can then use to identify potential staff or specialists.

While you’re doing this online, nothing can replace face-to-face networking – through job fairs, think tank events, conferences, meet-ups and yes, happy hours and parties. I’ve gotten work simply because I shared an office with someone, or was introduced to them at a bar-b-que.

Conclusion – Natural barriers

We can consider the four above-mentioned obstacles as “natural barriers.” They are part of the landscape. Everyone has faced them, and almost everyone who is working in their profession has overcome them (and gone on to face other obstacles in their career — but that’s another story).

The barriers I’ve described above are actually pretty straightforward, and there are established (and creative) methods for getting over and around them. Learn to enjoy the challenge. Don’t give up at the first rejection. Be resilient. (What you want to avoid doing is creating unnecessary barriers that you have inadvertently created yourself. More on those in a follow-up post.)

You may need to meet or get in touch with 25 people – remember, name recognition! – before one comes back to you and says, “I’d like to talk to you about a project…”