United Nations careers

United Nations careers. Where to try your luck?

United Nations careers attract the best specialist by respectable positions, meaningful jobs, and unique experience. However, many professionals don’t know how to get hired by the organization or can’t even guess how to improve the skills to become good candidates. Let’s consider the possible options to get noticed by the UN and improve employment chances.

Become a UN intern

Almost all the ways to join the UN have high requirements but this one. The internship program welcomes the students that are about the get Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. degree or have got it not more than a year ago. The internship duration is from 2 to 6 months. The best part of it is that some talented interns can become UN consultants. Unfortunately, the organization does not provide any financial, insurance, or visa support to the interns, but side-by-side work with the best professionals in the world is definitely worth it.

Become a UN volunteer

Volunteering in the UN provides a lot of career benefits. Yet, most of the roles require good professional skills and job experience. The program has short (about 3 months) and long term assignments (1 year and more), within which the volunteers will contribute to the mission as much knowledge and skills as possible. International volunteers will have to go to other countries; they also may work in stressful conditions. Thus, one of the main requirements for the candidates is good health. Volunteers get a living allowance, health insurance, and annual leave.

Join the Young Professional Programme

YPP is an initiative to help young professionals from underrepresented in the UN countries to start their United Nations careers. Every year specialists who are less than 32 years old can pass an exam and become UN employees. However, the list of the participating countries changes every year, and it is necessary to be a national of one of these countries to become a candidate. Other requirements are compliance with the demands of an open vacancy, fluency in English or French, and university degree of the first level. Relevant job experience is not necessary, but if there are more than 40 candidates of one nationality for the position, the experience will be considered.

Apply for the job

In fact, most of the employees get hired without being an intern or volunteer. The UN is interested in recruiting the best specialists, thus it considers the candidates following the standard HR process. All the UN job openings are published on careers.un.org. In general, every vacancy has a detailed description to help the applicants check if they are just right for the position. If you’d like to apply, create a profile on inspira.un. It will be used by the recruiters instead of the resume, and you’ll have to use it during the application process. Given that the competition for UN open positions is quite high, the candidates with less than 2 years of work experience are not considered. For mid-level positions, you need to have form 7 to 10 years, and for senior posts, it is 15 years of experience.