This is the last in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. The first is Know What You’re Getting Into. The second is Aid Work is a Profession. The third is Experience, Education and Personality. The forth is Where Do You Fit?

Following this post is a non-exhaustive list of web-based resources you may find helpful.

If it seems like I’m being a bit heavy on this profession so far, that’s because I’ve seen my fair share of damaged souls wandering along this particular career path. I’ve come close to the edge myself on more than one occasion, and would like to see fewer, rather than more, dysfunctional individuals working on field postings.

And with that said, hold on to your hats…

Aid work is an intoxicating, exciting and richly rewarding career. When it works. Often it doesn’t. Often things like politics, corruption, violence, interpersonal relationships, or sheer incompetence means that things fall apart. Things, like projects designed to save peoples lives. This can shake the strongest of people. When people are driven by values and a belief in the greater good of humankind, watching this sort of failure can leave them deeply wounded. I’ve known of it costing people their faith in humanity and in God. I’ve seen my fair share of cynics, and periodically count myself among them (though I still find myself drawn back, like a moth to a candle, to the hope that we can actually do something about this broken world). People become isolated. Some drop into depression.

They say three types of people are drawn to aid work. Missionaries, mercenaries, and misfits. Humour aside, it’s a fair description. You find a disproportionate number of people driven by values, by their thirst for experience or money, or people who just don’t know how to function in any other environment.

This can make the aid environment quite a dysfunctional one. Exotic, addictive, wonderfully unique, and utterly unhealthy. People jump from one emergency program to the next like it’s going out of fashion (Port-au-Prince? Ugh, that’s so 2010. It’s all Horn of Africa now darling.) They do the same with friendships, with relationships, with lovers. Work hard, play hard is the motto most employ when in the field. This might be the house-party scene, with drink or pills optional but frequently endorsed extras. It might be adrenaline sports. It might be risky travel options. Regardless, this line of work attracts the sort of person who thrives on an element of risk in most things they do. Not always the best approach to life.

I make all these statements with a healthy level of self-awareness.

Aid workers expose themselves to all manner of stresses. Some of us wander into life-threatening situations, which may sound great recanted in cavalier fashion over a couple of local brews, but in fact are anything but when you’re actually in them. Even those that don’t bear direct witness to terrible events are usually indirectly exposed to them on a routine basis. Reports suggest that above all of this, the single biggest cause of stress to aid workers is organizational dysfunction, where the pressures of a poorly managed response in a highly value-driven culture can be devastating, psychologically speaking.

These pressures lead to a whole range of stress reactions on the brain. I won’t go into too much detail, but this regular exposure to steady stress, which may or may not be coupled with repeated exposure to critical incident stress, results in physical changes to the makeup of the brain which cause long-term and in some cases irrepairable damage.

A lot of aid workers see psychologists (I am one). A lot more who don’t should.

The mobile and uncertain life of an aid worker takes a huge toll on the personal life. While the constant changing from one emergency-focused community to the next can be a lot of fun, it also means that forming deep, meaningful and stable relationships over time is very difficult. You meet a lot of single aid workers. You meet a lot of divorced aid workers. You meet a lot of aid workers who have significant marital problems, or who are disconnected from their children. And if you hang around long enough, you hear plenty of stories of married aid workers sleeping around on assignment too.

Even if that’s not the way you roll, finding and maintaining a relationship to a life partner is a challenge in this line of work. For all the negative stories I hear above, I also know plenty of men and women who make it work. But I’ll wager that they work at it a lot harder and more deliberately than their peers who don’t jet around the world at the drop of a seismograph.

It’s not just spouse and children you suffer disconnection from. Whether married or single, connecting to a stable group of friends in your home community becomes difficult as well. With you constantly on the move, you’ll find that most relationships start to slip, and you have to work hard to stay in touch with those you care about. It’s not uncommon to find that people simply stop inviting you to events because they never know when you’re around, or they’re tired of hearing you say that you’ll be overseas that weekend. I’ve found this has been one of my biggest struggles over the years, and I’ve spent long periods of time back at my home base feeling restless and lonely, struggling to maintain social networks, and wishing for my next overseas ‘fix’ instead- which ends up being just as lonely, in the long run.

If you’ve just read through the post this far and gone, “Heh heh, that sounds way cool,”, then you can sod off. Seriously. Stay at home. There are enough burned-out, dysfunctional and anti-social relief junkies out there. Some of them do a decent job at running a relief program, but most are a liability to themselves, and therefore to others as well. We have all of those we need. Don’t become another one.

If you’ve gotten this far and admitted, “You know what, that’s way more than I’m ready to cope with right now,” then no worries. Aid work isn’t for everyone. There are a zillion ways to help people in need in your local community, and there’s a lot of very wise argument that would say your efforts are best placed helping there anyway. It’s great that you care about the world enough to look into aid work, and make sure to keep connected to what’s happening in the world around us. Figure out the way you feel you’re best geared to give, then go do it.

If on the other hand you thought to yourself, “Man, I need to figure out a way to maintain my values in the face of contradicting experiences; I need to develop some good solid coping strategies that are going to hold me together when the pressure’s on; I need to really work on maintaining my relationships with the people in my life I care about if I’m going to do this work,” then congratulations. You may be ready to think about that career change after all.

I reiterate: I’m not saying aid work sucks. I’m not saying you’re destined to become a burned-out loner lurking in third-world bars preying on local prostitutes (though observational evidence suggests that if you’re going to become an aid worker, that’s still well within the realms of statistical probability…). Aid work is rewarding. If you take the effort to get yourself set up properly, work with a reputable agency, and work dilligently to minimize harm and improve the quality of assistance given to people in need, you can accomplish great things.

But if you walk into this line of work without the right mindset, you’re in trouble. You need to know what you’re getting yourself into. You need to understand that the aid industry is a profession, not just a hobby. You need to invest in getting the right set of skills, sufficient experience, and ensuring that your personality is going to gel with this line of work. You need to think through what it is you’re wanting to contribute to this line of work. And if you’re really serious about it, you need to have a plan to mitigate the highly destructive side-effects of the aid worker lifestyle.

***

This isn’t a comprehensive solution to becoming an aid worker. It is a handful of insights that I, as a professional aid worker, want to share with the significant number among you who are interested in this line of work and want to understand what it involves.

I know there are plenty of other aid workers out there who have other things they could add to this series, and possibly some varying opinions on some of what I’ve said. I’d welcome any comments, additions or disagreements you might have. Many of you may have specific resources that might help people interested in becoming aid workers find a starting point or move themselves ahead a little.

And to those of you out there who are seriously thinking about it, feel free to ask any more specific questions you might have that aren’t addressed here, and I’ll see if I can answer them. There are plenty of other very qualified, experienced and articulate aid workers who make themselves accessible via social media and the blogosphere, so do check out the people I’m interacting with on Twitter, follow them, and see what they have to say too.

Salaam, Shalom, Peace.

-MA

Resources:

Aid Workers

Tales From The Hood has a ream of material that catalogues, among other things, the perils of being an aid worker and some of the internal battles that this entails, in a highly entertaining, readable and often poignant style. His audience frequently includes students and would-be aid workers, and his blog should be required reading for anybody interested in the profession. He posted a couple of pieces specifically for students looking to become aid workers, which you can find here and here as a starting point.

Alanna Shaikh, another top-notch aid blogger, has a section of her home page dedicated to Jobs resources for wannabe aid workers (check the right hand column a few sections down)- I’ve linked a couple of them below. For two dollars a month you can subscribe to her newsletter ‘International Development Careers List‘ and get regular information and feedback on how to work in the aid industry.

Saundra, who runs Good Intentions Are Not Enough, has a page similarly dedicated to job resources, including a list of websites worth checking out and monitoring for job vacancies.

Web

A detailed pamphlet on how to find your first job as an aid worker can be found on Eldis, “Better Ways to find Humanitarian Employment“. Thanks to Alanna Shaikh for providing this link, and the next, on Change.org entitled “Finding a Job Overseas“.

Jobs4Development is another good gateway site to start browsing what’s out there.

Aid Agencies

Most agencies have clear links on their websites to where job availabilities can be browsed, although note that most of these are unlikely to be entry-level. Many NGOs have graduate or internship programs which enable young would-be aid professionals to get sector and field experience, but they are generally highly competitive and open to just a handful of applicants a year. The list below is not by any means exhaustive. There are hundreds of reputable agencies you could choose out there.

ADRA

CARE

MSF

Oxfam

Save the Children

UN Careers Portal

UN Volunteers

World Vision

This is the fourth in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. The first is Know What You’re Getting Into. The second is Aid Work is a Profession. The third is Experience, Education and Personality.

International NGOs are largely varied organizations, many of which are themselves large with extensively varied staff profiles.

The types of people who work in them often have vastly different skill sets and very different reasons for wanting to be there. Some are motivated by faith, others by guilt, others by experientialism, others (misguided fools) by money.

Think about how your vision, motivation and skillset would match with a particular organization.

First off, you have different types of organizations in the humantarian sector. You have development NGOs whose focus is on more stable context and looks at how to help alleviate structural poverty at a community level over many years. Their mandate differs from frontline aid agencies who work in unstable and often dangerous frontline conflict and disaster environments offering lifesaving assistance.

Some NGOs offer practical assistance- the delivery of goods and services directly to communities affected. Others offer less tangible support- focusing on human rights issues or policy change and development.

Some agencies have a very broad mandate, covering multiple sectors and who try and be everything to everyone. Others are highly specialised, and offer only one or two types of activitiy to their beneficiaries- water sources, perhaps, or emergency medical care. Still others are support agencies, which might offer services to other NGOs, such as logistics support, training or surge capacity. Some are local, or grassroots, agencies, with a very limited local mandate and extremely rooted in the communities which they serve. Some organizations don’t implement directly, but identify and work through partner agencies on the ground with whom they have relationships.

Some organizations are motivated by faith and carry out overt prosletysation as a part of their mission. Others are extremely secular and don’t appreciate any expression of religious identity.

There are not-for-profits, private development consultancies , fundraising and donor bodies, for-profit development contractors, corporations with corporate social responsibility programs. There are NGOs, government aid programs, UN organizations, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement.

There are- quite literally- thousands of aid agencies out there of varying kinds. I can’t even begin to compile a list here- that’s where your own research has to begin, guided by your own interest and vision in this department- and what you feel you have to offer.

Think about where you fit and what you’re wanting to give. If you’re motivated by your faith, you may be inclined to source a faith-based organization or even a missionary organization. If you’ve got fifteen years professional experience as a trauma surgeon, then a frontline medical NGO could be up your street. If you’re trained as an agronomist and have a vision to see crop yields increase in marginal farming areas, you’re probably after a development organization with a mandate for food security.

Aid agencies, like any other organization out there, employ accountants, administrative staff, auditors, lawyers, HR personnel, media officers, marketers, communicators, IT gurus, managers and all manner of other support functions as well. Most of these posts are at headquarters level. Many exist at the field level as well, although they may well be filled by local staff (as they should be in most circumstances). So don’t let the fact that you don’t have training or experience in third world development stop you from commencing a career in aid work if that’s a shift you want to take. And don’t let the fact that you’re terrified of large spiders, get plane sick, and break out in a heat rash every time you look at a postcard with palm trees stop you from fulfilling your dream of contributing to the alleviation of poverty. Many of these roles never require you to leave your own suburb, and are little different in their accessibility than other similar roles in the for-profit corporate world.

Where you fit is going to be some combination of your personal vision, your experience and skillset, and your personality, the latter three discussed in my last post in this series. You alone are going to be best suited to decide on the starting-point for that journey, and from there see where you get to.

***

Two things to think about here with respect to selecting an organization. First, if your motivation is grounded in the genuine desire to help the less fortunate (and I hope that, by and large, it is), then please make sure you offer your time and services to an organization that takes these things seriously. As I’ve talked about earlier, there is a long list of professional standards and codes that aid organizations should embed their work in. Ensure that your organization takes these things seriously. A good starting point is ensuring that it has adopted the Red Cross Code of Conduct. Another, for your own sake, is that it adheres to the principles of People in Aid. The principle here is, do no harm. If this is an NGO that doesn’t take these things seriously and behaves unprofessionally, not only does this cast other NGOs into disrepute, but stands a very real risk of causing harm to the people it’s trying to help.

Professional standards alone aren’t the be-all and end-all of aid work, nor are they enough to guarantee good outcomes or avoid failures. But agencies which flaunt them have a much higher likelihood of creating harm, not good.

In the same vein, think very carefully before investing yourself in a startup NGO (or, indeed, in starting your own NGO). This is something that happens particularly around large disasters, such as the Haiti earthquake. People, often motivated by a genuine desire to help, look at the situation and figure, ‘Hey, I can do something to help there’. Then they grab a suitcase full of money, get on a plane, and start running around the streets of whatever afflicted country has taken their fancy spreading their do-goodness.

Every NGO has its starting point, and I’m not going to say that these (hopefully) well-meaning projects are universally awful. But generally, when you take somebody who has limited or no knowledge or experience of working in a disaster zone, they’re probably going to make mistakes. The sort of mistakes that more established organizations have made in the past and have measures in place to avoid. It’s a case of not knowing what they don’t know. They make coordination very difficult, they have little or no knowledge of international standards, and when they do a poor job, they cause headaches for other organizations.

I’m sure you’ll be able to find me examples of Mom & Pop NGOs which have accomplished great things in Port-au-Prince. That’s great. There were around 10,000 NGOs that registered to work in Haiti following the earthquake. You show me those examples, and I’ll ask you about the other 9,820 startups that descended en-masse into the chaos in January 2010.

As a professional aid worker (and knowing I speak for hundreds of other professional aid workers) I ask you to consider very carefully before getting involved with that particular aspect of the humanitarian industry. This has been discussed ad nauseum in other portions of the aid blogosphere, so I won’t go into further detail here. It’s not always a popular line to criticise peoples’ good intentions, but sometimes these things have to be said.

If I haven’t offended, disillusioned or generally knocked the stuffing out of you yet, check out Part 5 of this series, Counting the Cost.

This is the third in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. The first is Know What You’re Getting Into. The second is Aid Work is a Profession.

There are a lot of people wanting to be aid workers. Far and away the most popular roles are those that are based out of western countries but with a healthy dose of travel. For example, in my own office, when we have a role such as mine come up, we generally have between one and two hundred applicants per position. This number tapers off a lot when we start hiring for full-time field positions, but that’s because the hiring criteria are a lot tougher.

In brief, aid agencies are looking for a mix of appropriate skills, relevant experience, and the right personality. It’s a bit of a nebulous mix and there’s no magic formula. However, if you’re lacking one of these three, you’re really going to struggle to get employed by an NGO.

a) Skills and Education

Once upon a time, people from a range of backgrounds could get sent to the field with charity groups. Today, NGOs are much more specific about the sorts of educational backgrounds. The room for vocational skills is relatively small now, as most skilled jobsets can be sourced locally (see above).

NGOs will generally be looking for a graduate degree of some sort that demonstrates that an applicant has a general overview of developing country contexts. This covers a pretty wide range of options and could be a degree in development studies, in economic development, in sociology or in demographics, as a handful of examples. NGOs want to know that you understand the implications of working in developing countries- fundamental principles such as participation, dependency, risk management, and a generalist’s knowledge of less developed countries.

For more technical skillsets and people interested in technical field work, there’s also a broad range of options. For those interested in long-term development work, things like agronomy, agriculture, economics and public health are all relevant degrees. Medical doctors and nurses, logisticians, civil engineers and nutrition specialists can all find technical roles in an emergency response team.

This sort of degree will not get you in the door. Most applicants will have this sort of educational background, and you not only won’t stand out, but will probably be surpassed by the very high number of people with two or more degrees- often a Bachelors and a Masters, and often one generalist degree with a second more specialised qualification.

An additional note for westerners looking for overseas roles: you’re also competing with expatriates from non-western countries. As global education levels rise, more and more people from countries that were once net receivers of expatriate aid workers are now net givers. East Africa and India both produce a huge portion of many NGOs’ expatriates. And not are they often willing to work for lower salaries than western expatriates, but they are often older, with more developed skillsets, more field experience, and a better knowledge of working in non-western cultural contexts, all making them very attractive as employees. So if you’re wanting to work for an international NGO as an expatriate, you really have to think very carefully about what it is that you have to offer over a graduate from the University of Nairobi with fifteen years of relevant experience.

b) Experience

Education alone is probably not going to get you in the door, but needs to be balanced with experience. There is a bit of a trade-off that happens here. People with the right field experience can often get in on that merit, even if they lack some educational qualifications (although most will find it more of a struggle to climb the career ladder in this instance, and I know a lot of people with 10 or more years of aid experience who are now doing part-time or distance learning to get a masters degree and make them more promotable). Likewise, younger hopefuls with limited field experience but the right attitude and a couple of solid degrees can get over the threshold and be given a shot at an NGO posting.

Experience is the one that gets most young would-be aid workers most frustrated. “How do I get the necessary experience to work with an NGO if no NGO will hire me until I have experience?”

I sympathise. I was in the same boat for a while too.

The flip-side, of course, is that from the perspective of an aid agency, the very last thing they want to do is send some untested junior staffer into a highly complex and possibly dangerous emergency response where mistakes cost lives, just to see whether they’re made of the right stuff. They want to have some assurance that this individual is going to be able to work in the team. Hence wanting to see experience.

For some NGOs, ‘experience’ doesn’t have to mean working in developing countries. If you have ten years of professional experience, this is going to count for something if you have a skill-set relevant to the sector. Medical NGOs, for example, may well send doctors and nurses to the front lines if they have a number of years demonstrated work in an emergency room. Likewise logisticians have valuable skillsets that are quite easily transfered. Men and women with military service can find that they slot quite easily into certain NGO roles- although not always with such ease into NGO culture.

Many smaller NGOs will be less choosy about the level of experience they expect from applicants. If they lack the budgets that larger agencies offer, they will be receiving fewer top-level candidates, and the competition for roles will be less fierce. However, remember that there are still a LOT of people chasing a small number of roles. It’s also worth ensuring that the organization offers the support you as a newbie need. Being chucked off the deep end into an unfamiliar context without the appropriate experience and support can be a great learning opportunity. Or it can wreck your career, and possibly your mental health in the process.

Local or grass-roots NGOs in-country are often the best way in. Of all the NGO types out there, not only will they likely be the least choosy in terms of qualifications (often only able to pay local wages, if that) but as a westerner, you will probably actually have something significant to offer that is different to the rest of their staff- for example, your language skills, your knowledge of donor cultures, your ability to network with other expatriates at coordination meetings, and an external perspective. Significant work with local NGOs will definitely start clocking up points on the experience meter, and will also provide some great learning opportunities and demonstrate cross-cultural skills. And if you’re sitting in-country with a local NGO, you have the opportunity to network with other larger agencies if you so wish. You’re much more likely to build the necessary relationships to get in to an NGO if you’re based out of Nairobi or Lusaka than you will in Toronto or Phoenix.

A respectful little note here. Some of what might pass for ‘experience’ of third world countries around the college bar won’t actually slice the Dijon where aid agencies are concerned. The three-week missions trip you took to Tijuana when you were 17, that voluntourism project at the Cambodian orphanage, or the gap-year you spent backpacking around South America where you worked for 2 months at a hostel in Cusco may all be great experiences which changed your life and from which you draw a lot of personal satisfaction, and that’s great. However if they’re the only thing on your resume, don’t expect to stand out from the pack, and don’t expect the HR staff to get too excited.

c) Personality

In addition to education and experience, you also need to have the right personality. Aid work is a highly stressful profession, and it brings out the very best and the very worst in peoples’ tempraments. Team leaders want to know that the staff they’re deploying are going to be able to work in that environment, and not just make more work for the rest of the team who have to tiptoe around their dysfunction.

This aspect is a little harder to quantify, and can be quite subjective. The je ne sais quoi of the aid world.

As a rule, though, when it comes to this side of things, I can ask myself, who would I want next to me when the proverbial is hitting the spinny thing? When I look at the context I described above (chaotic, rapidly changing, potentially dangerous, highly stressful, professionally rigorous), what characteristics are going to help somebody perform as part of a team?

In fact, one of the first things most aid workers (myself included) would put on that list would be ‘a good sense of humour’. Beyond that: adaptable, flexible, quick to learn new things, strong critical analysis skills, independant but also a good team player, good communicator, able to take and manage risks, demonstrated ability to work in a cross-cultural team, ability to manage stress over a prolonged period of time…

And more.

These aren’t the characteristics you find in every expat aid worker. They are ones you find in most of the good aid workers however. And they’re the ones I’d be looking for in any aid worker I’d want to take with me into an emergency response.

If you reckon you do a good job hitting a good balance of education, experience and personality, then think about how you can demonstrate these things to an NGO on your CV and in an interview. If you reckon there are some gaps, are they gaps that can be filled (e.g. by a graduate degree, a couple of years spent working with a grass-roots NGO in South Asia, the surgical implantation of a sense of humour…)?

There’s no hard and fast rule. You can tick all these boxes and still not get in the door with the NGO of your choice, because it’s a highly competitive sector and many others also have these criteria met. You can also miss out on some of them and still get yourself a position- being the right person at the right time to the right organization. But the above list should give you a starting point for what you should be presenting to an HR officer if you’re looking for a job with an NGO.

To be the right person at the right time for the right organization, consider what you actually want to do and read on with Part 4 of this series.

NB: For those wondering about my own track into the humanitarian world (and note this is now nearly 10 years ago, when the industry was at a much earlier stage of professionalisation):

I grew up overseas in the UN system, with a parent working for a UN humanitarian organization and me attending an international school. By the time I interviewed for my first NGO role, I had lived in 6 different countries and visited about 25. I was bilingual (French/English) with a decent grasp of Spanish, and had a lifetime of demonstrated cross-cultural communication and adaptability. I had a Bachelor’s degree in social science (with units focusing on issues in developing countries, on disasters, and on risk management) and a Masters degree in development and the environment, both from a respected University. I had spent time working with projects in a couple of different countries, one as a volunteer and one as part of my Masters thesis.

In all, I was definitely light-on in the experience side of things, but I was also one of the lucky ones who happened to show up on the doormat at just the right time. I also had a cultural/experiential background (through no skill of my own) that recommended me to this line of work. I got myself a desk-job which was largely project paperwork, and from there took several other office jobs over the next year and a half. Since then, I’ve had a bunch of different jobs, between which have taken me to a further 25-or-so countries and dozens of humanitarian projects. I consider myself a humanitarian professional and expect this line of work to be a part of my career for many years to come. It is also something that, despite it’s regular and often deep frustrations, is something I love doing and find richly satisfying (sometimes perversely-so).

This is the second in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. Read the first, Know What You’re Getting Into.

Twenty years ago, you could have a pulse and some good intentions, and you could get youself shipped off to almost any war-zone in the world as an aid worker.

Those days are gone. Long gone.

While aid work is a relatively new profession (when compared to such golden oldies as politics or prostitution), it has been around for more than fifty years, and is caged in a growing body of professional standards and expectations which are continuing to develop.

As well as the core values which the aid community is expected to adhere to, there are the professional standards by which the work we do is judged. Some of these are sector specific (Sphere) while others are generic, cross-cutting or industry-wide, such as protection standards, or accountability to communities.

Aid work is a highly complex job. It involves being able to work to these professional standards, applying them in accordance with humanitarian principles, in a rapidly-changing and potentially chaotic or dangerous environment, with poor information about events or impact, in a time-critical manner, and often with limited resources available.

As such, the sorts of people that aid agencies are looking for are the sorts of people who can function well in these environments. Aid agencies aren’t looking for casual volunteers, or for well-meaning individuals whose skill-sets don’t add anything to the organization’s work, or for people who want to take a year out from their career or studies while they look for meaning in their life. They’re looking for dedicated professionals who have taken the time to learn the skills and soak in the body of knowledge that accompanies the sector.

Please think of aid work as you would any other professional sector. You would not want to go to the dentist with a cavity only to find that he had taken out time from her career as a lawyer three months ago and decided she’d try her hand at pulling teeth instead, which had always been a hobby of hers. You would not expect to walk into a bank without qualifications or experience and be offended when the manager turned you away despite your passion for balancing accounts. And you would be horrified to learn that your local emergency room was staffed by enthusiastic community volunteers.

In the aid industry (and yes, it is an industry) we deal with meeting the critical needs of hundreds of thousands of people at a time. If we get it right, we can prevent thousands of deaths. If we get it wrong, thousands can die. Please don’t think that because you watch world events on the news and have a strong feeling about what’s happening, that that qualifies you for aid work. The aid industry is profession, because it’s highly complex, and when people make bad decisions, even with the best of intentions, the ramifications can be terrible.

One thing that really upsets aid workers and HR staff is people who pop up when a huge emergency breaks, wanting to be an aid worker and sent to whichever location happens to be making dramatic and heart-wrenching headlines this week. You may think this is an excellent time to get sent to the field. The rest of us think this is a terrible time.

Firstly, very few reputable aid agencies will send volunteers to the field. Even to a stable context you won’t find that many opportunities to go outside the handful of volunteer-oriented organizations such as Peace Corps, Australian Volunteers or VSO, and of course UN Volunteers. Don’t offer, and if you don’t get a reply from us please don’t be offended, we simply don’t have time to turn down all the offers of well-meaning people wanting to get sent overseas in the midst of a crisis which has other priorities to manage.

Secondly, the onset of an emergency is not the right time to decide you want a career change. If you’ve been thinking about changing careers to be an aid worker (and I assume at some stage that’s the case if you’re reading this blog) that’s great! Make some structural decisions in your life, get some degrees and experience, then come back when you have what we need. If you show up at our door three days after a huge disaster saying you want to be an aid worker, we will assume that this is a flash-in-the-pan emotional response and not take you seriously. If you go out there and get yourself the right qualifications and experience, then come back to us, there are always places we can use you. They may not be in the headlines right now, but I assure you, there’s no shortage of humanitarian need worldwide, nor will there be any time soon.

Without wanting to sound harsh, I want to make something really clear. If you’re showing up full of good intentions but not a whole lot of professional backing, we don’t actually need you. When there’s a shortage of aid workers on the ground, it’s not a shortage of warm bodies that we’re talking about. We need the right person for whatever role it is we’re trying to fill. It might be a logistician. It might be an experienced operations manager with fifteen years of disaster relief experience. But it certainly isn’t somebody who means really well and who once took a vacation to Nicaragua.

I won’t belabour the point. This has been talked about plenty of places elsewhere. To understand more on why your desire to do good doesn’t necessarily equate to improving the plight of the poor and needy, please spend some time looking at the blog “Good Intentions are Not Enough” (start here, here and here).

I also recommend three books to anybody wanting to start off in the aid world as essential background reading to understanding some of the ways in which aid workers have, despite good intentions, ended up solving nothing and in some cases making bad situations worse.

War Hospital, by Sheri Fink- a staggering, chilling narrative of international intervention failing to prevent the massacre of Srebrenica.

Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins- the story of an idealistic but misguided young aid worker in Southern Sudan in the 80s and 90s.

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch- a series of accounts written of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, highlighting some of the breathtaking failures of the international community

To understand more about what we are looking for and the sort of professionalism the aid industry embraces, please read Part 3 of this series, coming up.

As an aid worker, there’s one question I get more than any other, both from people I know and people I don’t. It’s some variant on “So, what should I do if I want to become an aid worker?”

I don’t actually mind being asked this question. It’s great that people are interested in this line of work. Clearly there’s a perception that working in the aid profession is either meaningful, or interesting, or some combination of both. The answer isn’t straight-forward though, and takes a while to answer, so I thought I’d put down the main principles of what it takes to be an aid worker on my blog, which I could direct people to when they ask.

Please note that this five-part series is written largely for the audience who primarily asks this question, namely people (usually but not exclusively younger) living in Western nations who want to help overseas. For my readers from non-Western nations, getting employment with an international NGO is quite a different prospect. If you have specific questions about this, please feel free to add a comment after any of these posts. Likewise this does not target those who wish to volunteer locally with an NGO in their area of residence. This is usually a much easier process so contact the local branch of the charity you’re interested in for more information.

Please also note that this is not a guide to getting a job within the aid industry. You need to talk to a careers advisor for that, or make some time to talk to an HR officer within an aid agency. That said, at the end of this 5-part series I will post a series of links to some resources that may be helpful. There will be other links scattered throughout the series that provide additional information or debate on some of the points raised which I would recommend you browse if you’re serious about taking this forward.

To others within the aid community, if you have other thoughts or resources you want to share on this theme, I’d welcome your input in the comments sections below each post, as I hold no monopoly on information in this sector. Thanks for your time.

PS- Sorry, but no, I can’t get you a job with an aid agency. It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just not what I do…

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 1. Know What You’re Getting Yourself Into

So you want to be an aid worker?

First, read this (particularly the second half): A Day in the Life Of…

Still with me? Okay, let’s go.

The idea of aid work has a lot of romance attached to it, particularly in the Western world. In the Gen-X/Gen-Y worldview, its identity sits neatly in the nexus of a value-driven, unique vocation which allows travel all over the world and lots of amazing experiences. Kind of like a perennial gap-year which you get paid for.

This isn’t an accurate reflection. While aid work has the humanitarian imperative (the need to help others) at its core, working in an international NGO can be as much about working out how to compromise values as how to uphold them. It can be unique, but at times it can be like any other desk-job, replete with emails, deadlines, reports and administrative systems. For every amazing experience, there can be months and even years of office-based tedium. Your chances of soaking in the warm glow of being thanked by a horde of grateful villagers for saving their collective lives is extremely low. And if they do, they’ll almost certainly hit you up with a shopping list of all the things they want done in their village right afterwards.

I don’t want to make it sound like being an aid worker sucks. I love it. I’ve had incredibly enriching experiences. But I’ve also had some bitterly painful, frustrating and dissapointing ones, ones that have shattered my ideals and come close to breaking me. It’s important to approach this career with this in mind.

Realists, welcome. Idealists, beware.

If you are an educated westerner seeking employment with an international aid agency, you will almost certainly have one of three broad roles. An office-based support role. An office-based manager. Or a technical expert.

Almost anything else- from skilled tradesmen to field workers to project implementers- will be drawn from local staff. Local staff work for local wages (we don’t need to employ your two graduate degrees to be handing out grain sacks, nor do we need to export your carpentry skills into a chaotic emergency when there are hundreds of skilled carpenters available locally all scrambling to rebuild their livelihoods). Hiring local staff builds local skills and contributes to local economies. And local staff have the social and cultural access that makes them better able to do the work. If hiring you is going to deprive somebody local of an income, who can do the job just as well and for less money, you won’t be getting the role.

Being an aid worker, like many other professions, has giddy heights, deep lows, and long periods of intense boredom in the meantime. Be prepared for this.

If you have romantic memories of the time you did a voluntourism trip to Costa Rica and helped build a school, shelf them. If you’re expecting to be handing out sacks of food to happy smiling brown people, get your facts straight. And if you’re looking for a perennial paid gap-year experience, please stay at home. Aid work is a profession.

Read more about what this means in Part 2 of this series, coming next…