The World Bank recently did a study on their reports. They found that 40% of the reports they produce are never once downloaded from their website, and another 40% are seen by less than 100 people.
The lesson here is that being well read and having good ideas is not an in-demand thing. The dude who thinks Stephen King killed John Lennon is well read and has lots of ideas. Bookstores are all over the place and everyone has an opinion. You may be exceptionally good at it, but it doesn’t really matter.
People need either:
People with skills at translate good ideas into action. This may be technical knowledge, it may be leadership and the ability to assemble a good team, and it may be the ability to navigate through a bureaucracy. But it’s always about action.
People with the ability to make money, raise funds, or convince congress to fund something. If you think about it, this is just a subset of the first one, but it’s a pretty important one.
Whenever you think about what you can contribute, this is what you need to think: Does this cause action or make money? If not, it’s very unlikely anyone is going to pay you to do it.
The traditional route into development is:
Peace Corps or equivalent to get your basic experience aboard and learn some languages
Internship with a major donor (USAID, World Bank, UN, etc.) to get an understanding of how the funding side work. Ideally, this will have a competent abroad.
Graduate degree in related field with a strong technical (public health, education, agriculture, law, etc.) focus or a very strong regional focus and a technical “minor”
Entry level BS job with a major organization that will quickly rocket into a mid-career position based on your years of previous experience, which will cause you to lament being a million miles from the field (even if you are in the field) and will make you question why you are doing it.
OR
Entry level BS job with a small organization that will quickly lead to you being in over your head and massively underpaid for what you are doing, but which you hope will tee you up for something more sensible before you burn out.
There are some variations on this. Sometimes the process can be sped up by becoming a contractor in a war zone, and sometimes the grad school comes later. But it’s hard to skip many of these steps. Development is a very practice oriented discipline.
I’m not saying this to discourage you. But rather to give you a way of thinking about your next step. You need a technical focus or a regional focus that you can back up, and some skills you can sell. If you can build a solid technical expertise, people aren’t going to worry too much about your personality.
Lemmytheseal2, have you any experience with data? People who are strong analytically tend to do good with numbers and statistics. With training, this could be the skill that gets you in the door somewhere. As someone who is not extraverted or into schmoozing, I carved a little niche for myself with numbers, since many people are math-phobic.
I think the thing you’re missing is technical expertise. If you’ve got great social skills, you don’t have to focus so much on the technical stuff. But if you’re weak socially, then you’ve got to be a brainaic. And not by being a font of information. The savant-type employee isn’t that valuable now that we’re all just a few swipes of the finger from Google. You’ve got to be able to do stuff. Like by learning GIS or database management or statistics.
So if you can’t do the language class thing, I would seriously think about taking some evening classes that will improve your analytical capabilities.
Sorry for the delay! I studied US Foreign Policy, but as part of my program I got to explore the development world via three classes. Nearly everyone to whom I mention my program asks if I have/had a regional focus, and I say “not really.”
Yeah, I saw that news about the WB reports. Also, I never planned on working in development, or I would have studied it directly, among other things. I just wanted to learn more about it, so that it could better influence the decisions I make in my career, such as it is. I think the relationship is criminally overlooked.
I have a little bit of statistical/database experience. I probably can (and perhaps must) work on the languages, but you’re saying some sort of statistical studying is a good idea at this moment?
I wish the folks at the career center, among others, would be so candid.
How easy is it to bag a job solely or primarily based on a high exam score? I think one of the issues the OP mentioned was doing poorly on interviews. I’ve also felt similar to the OP in that I have a lot of book learning but am at a disadvantage getting jobs due to bombing the interview. I’ve wanted to walk into a competitive examination, blow it away, and start the job Monday.
I was under the impression that the days of “You passed the exam, here’s your job - You scored 85, required score for hire was 75” were over and that even “exam track” jobs required more - that passing (or even getting the highest score) only put you on a list of candidates to be interviewed and the hiring manager could pick and choose from the selection.
Not exactly, in that I’ve only gotten one interview. Before even coming to grad school, after several years passed before I understood that my BAs qualified me to work in various offices for a living wage (my parents knew this, but probably assumed I already knew this and just needed time to decide or ‘find myself’ or whatever), I actually did very well in an interview, but was passed over due to circumstantial bad luck. So, I’m not too concerned with doing well in interviews, should I get a few more.
No, I can’t seem to make the connections that get one’s resume flagged (assuming mine is good enough, which it may not be), or to be told about jobs that aren’t posted, etc.
Robert_columbia, It depends on the job. In the FSOT there’s a very rigorous interview/selection process. OTOH, there are competive jobs in my civil service system, the hiring rules dictate that one of the top three test scorers must be hired. In other words, the employer can choose among the top 3 scorers, but must hire one of them. They can’t choose from everyone who scored “pretty well” as you are describing.
Among software developers, there’s a pretty ingrained idea about how to distinguish “real” job listings from “fake” listings for jobs that are already filled. When you see a listing that has so many bullet points (e.g. five years of Java, five years of C++, at least a master’s degree, fluent in French, Six Sigma Black Belt, at least two years of experience with international banking systems, CCNA certification, three years in applied artificial intelligence systems design, and six years experience using Rational Rose) that you wonder how anyone could get them all, you’re seeing a “Foreign Labor Certification” listing that Immigration requires before the “real” candidate can be given a visa. The sponsoring company, knowing who they want to hire, simply makes a list of all the person’s background qualifications knowing that almost nobody will have the exact same ones. If they get a resume from the general public, they will find any excuse to trash it on a technicality - “We require TWO YEARS in international banking, this resume only states ‘Experience in banking IT’, I can’t tell if it meets the requirements, goodbye loser.” Then they go crying to USCIS that they can’t find any qualified Americans to do the job <sobs> and so can we please get this guy a visa?