Making it as international development & humanitarian aid professional | Stephen Ladek | TEDxUWCCR

Unless you've been living an unplugged life underneath a rock in a desert somewhere, you know that we're living in a time of unprecedented wealth and prosperity. Unfortunately, we're also living in a time of unprecedented tragedy and crisis. I'm here today to talk to you about those crises and if you, if you're like me, how you could craft a career working on the solutions to those problems as an international development or humanitarian aid professional. Now, if you are interested in this career, you really sort of have your pick of the litter about the problems that you want to work on. You could focus on the immediate, things like the Central African Republic, the Ukraine, Syria, the Ebola crisis, or you could look at more systemic problems, things like education or poverty reduction or women's rights or human rights. You might want to look at problems that deal with Mother Nature, things like global climate change or disaster risk reduction or maybe you want to look at man-made problems, things like economic empowerment or my personal favorite, why we still think in the 21st century it's a completely rational decision to kill each other to solve our problem. If you want to craft a career in this, in this particular sector, it can be mind-boggling trying to figure out how to get in, even for those of us who've been doing it for a while. I've had the privilege of being an international development humanitarian professional for more than 10 years, first working in Washington D.C. for NGOs and then starting my own consulting company called International Solutions Group. As I've worked around the world, I've met lots and lots of people and I'm often asked the question, how do I get into this business? How do I do this? And most importantly, how do I craft a career in international development or humanitarian aid that's both satisfying and sustainable? I've been lucky enough over the past year to be the host of a podcast called Terms of Reference. It's a part of a service called Aidpreneur and as a part of this podcast, I get to interview an international development or humanitarian aid rock star every week. I get to ask them lots and lots of questions, but I always ask them one similar question and that question is like, you've been able to craft success, you've been able to be successful in this business, what advice would you give to someone who's interested in either getting into this sector or transitioning from another sector into humanitarian aid and international development? I listened to more than 50 interviews that I gave last year and when I listened to this question, I found that there were really seven themes that came out about how you can create both sustainability and satisfaction in this career. The first is that you need to get educated. Now, this may seem like a no-brainer to everyone sitting in this particular auditorium right now, but everyone in this business is wicked smart, right? They have PhDs, they have master's degrees and they want to let you know that you need to have that broad-based liberal arts education, they wanted to make sure that you know that you need to be able to connect political contexts, you need to understand cultures and the history about where people and problems come from, but really they had three skills that you need to bring to the table when you get educated. The first one is data analysis. You need to know how to do quantitative and qualitative qualitative data analysis. Why is this? If you look at any report issued by a government agency, a UN agency, an NGO, it's packed with charts and graphs and data and you need to be able to not only interpret that, but understand the spin behind those data so that you can make sense in your own career. The second skill is writing, being a good writer. As I just mentioned, UN agencies, government agencies, NGOs, they put out reports, they put information online. Being able to communicate through the written word is absolutely essential to be able to get your idea across succinctly and effectively. And the third skill is languages. Now, everyone in this room probably speaks two or three or four different languages and those are all going to be useful, but you might want to also consider languages that are going to be appropriate for where the problems are in the development context today. Things like Arabic, Pashtun, Urdu, and these types of languages. So after you get educated, the second thing that you want to make sure that you have is field experience. When you think about the UNICEF poster, what you usually see is someone giving a vaccination to a child, giving a training in a school, maybe working in a field, digging a well. These are what we normally think of when we think of international development and humanitarian aid. So getting that field experience however you can is a critical essential. It's a rite of passage for those of us who work in the field. Now, the best way to do that is through volunteer opportunities. If you're from the United States, the Peace Corps is an obvious opportunity, or there's just tons of opportunities out there as far as faith-based organizations, educational institutions, you name it. Get out there and get that experience so that you can actually create that credibility for those who are already in the business. The caveat here is that for every one person who's out there in the field giving those vaccinations or digging that well, there are two, three, four other people who are back in the headquarters or in a field office who are doing things like finance, who are doing things like logistics, operations, information technology, and the all-important proposal writing. So the point here is that while the career in the field is really the sexy one that most people think about, but you also might consider looking at one of these alternative career paths that can still have impact and still create change on some of these global problems. After you've got education, you've got field experience, all of our guests said that you need to be able to bring some tangible value to the table. This is sort of kind of bad news for those of us that are studying development studies right now or international affairs or international relations, and while those are quality degrees to get, what our guests really were looking for is something super tangible that can be applied right now. Things like engineering degrees. If you're a doctor, if you're a lawyer, if you do have technology skills, something that you can look at a problem and say, here's how I can contribute today. The good news is if you do have one of those development educations or international affairs proposal writing, that rose writing skills is always an evergreen need throughout the development and humanitarian aid profession. The caveat here is that if you are an expert, let's just say you're a microfinance expert, they really encourage you not to be a hammer in search of a nail, and that means not every problem is going to be microfinance related, or not every problem is going to be technology related, or not every problem is going to have an engineering solution. So you've got some education, you've got your field experience, you know a tangible skill you're going to need to bring to the table. The fourth theme that we found was that you need to be able to build community. I don't know about you, but I've never been able to walk up to a patch of soil and say, give me some vegetables and have it work. Or walk up to a tree and say, hey, give me some fruit. Creating a network or building a community is much like gardening. You can't just go into a situation and ask to take, take, take from it. The most important skill you can have when trying to build a community is figuring out how do you give to it? And the most important question you can ask is, how do I help? And much like a garden or a tree or an orchard, the more that you help, the more that you give it. You cultivate the soil, that you give it water, that you make sure it has care and feeding. Eventually it will not only bear fruit, but that fruit will start to come back to you in multitudes. The caveat here is that in order to build a community, in order to network, you have to get uncomfortable. You have to put yourself out in those situations. You have to go to strange places and meet strange people. But fortunately, there are strategies how to do this successfully. Have a funny story or have a little icebreaker that you can use to start a conversation with somebody. Or sometimes more importantly, be able to excuse yourself politely from a conversation when it's not really going where you want to go or you sort of find yourself backed into a corner. If you can build community, our experts that we listened to also said that you need to remain passionate and persistent. Now, these could be the two most overused words in the professional realm of all time, right? You got to be passionate. You got to be persistent. Fortunately, there is a distinction for both of these that we learned that are very relevant to our profession. What we mean by passion is that you need to go into this business knowing what problem that you want to solve or at least have effect on. You want to know what needle that you want to move or lever that you want to pull so that you can look back one year, three years, five years from now and say, hey, you know, all of those proposals I wrote, all of those reports I wrote, all of those, you know, frequent flyer miles that I gained as I traveled around the world, I know that it moved the needle on this particular problem. What we mean by persistence is making sure that you have that core belief or core value that you can turn to for those times when you've been kicked in the teeth. And what I mean by that is you will get told no thousands of times. Your proposal will be declined hundreds of times. And as I've seen, you'll see the work that you've been working on for two, three, four years completely erased through the pen of a politician in one second. You need to be able to have a place that you can go to be able to get up the next day and say, I remember why I'm doing this. The caveat here is that you got to remember that you need to be able to spin. I have yet to find someone who has the organization, the funding and the passion, the critical goal aligned in such a way that they match word for word. You got to be able to say, hey, look, I'm going to go work on this project and I can see how that contributes to the goal that I want to achieve. The sixth theme, I'll be completely honest with you, kind of caught me by surprise. But once I thought about it for a while, it makes complete sense. This is a service business. You have to be humble in a service business because we, I've found the people who are in this profession, we're not only smart, we're ambitious, we're educated. We want to get out there and change the world. But one of the things that we need to remember is that it's about serving others. It's about making sure that the decisions we make and the actions that we take really are lifting other people up and we're really putting them first. So being able to practice that muscle of empathy, being able to really be an active listener to understand what the context is, absolutely essential. And the caveat here is that your most important work will probably go unnoticed. You will probably work in the middle of nowhere in one of the most challenging places in the world and no one will ever hear about it. That can be a tough thing to hear for someone who is highly ambitious, super educated, and really wants to get out there and solve problems. But it's the truth of the matter. The final thing that we heard while listening to our experts over this last year is that you need to remember that this is an unusual profession. There is no one path into international development and humanitarian aid. It's not like being a lawyer. It's not like being a doctor. Many people just stumble into it. And if you were to go back and listen to these podcasts as I did, you find that almost to a one, they talk about, oh, I had a conversation on a train one time and that's how I got my first volunteering opportunity. Or I was, you know, taking a vacation one time and I saw these people that I could help and I started asking questions and that's how I stumbled into this field. This is even my story. I dropped out of college four times. I then eventually was lucky enough to get a degree in farm and ranch management. That led me, of course, immediately to a career in high technology, which I did for five or six years. That led me to flying around the world recruiting people to come back to the United States to, you know, fill technology positions. And then one day I actually woke up in New Delhi in India and realized that, you know, I probably want to use the talents that I have in a different way to solve some of these global problems. So getting into this profession, what the ultimate advice is, is that you have to look for happenstance. You have to look for moments of serendipity. And most importantly, you have to be willing to take the risk and make the leap to take those opportunities when they present themselves. This profession, as I said, is not a normal profession. As soon as you enter into it, as soon as you find yourself walking down this path, you'll find that your life changes. You'll find that it's difficult to tell stories to the people back home about what it is that you do. You'll start answering questions like, what exactly is it that you do for a living anyway? Well, I'm here to tell you the nice part about the fact that even though this profession is a little bit crazy is that you can't have a normal life. I'm lucky enough to have my wife of almost 10 years in the stage in the auditorium with us today. We've lived in three different countries. We have three beautiful children. And creating something of a normal life as an overseas international development and humanitarian aid professional is possible. It's just about making choices, making choices about what career path one or both of you will take, making choices about how you're going to raise your children, making choices about how you're going to create community. And while you can't ever go back once you go down this path, the good news is, is that you will become a part of this community of people just like you. And they're here to support you. They're here to listen to your stories. And they're here to make sure that you are successful. Thank you very much.