How to create a cover letter for a UN internship?
What you need to know to get a job at the United Nations? How can you enter the UN career path?
There is no golden rule or recipe but luckily some tips and tricks that are useful and can save you a lot of time. As one thing is for sure, the procedure is neither quick nor simple.
Depending on your ‘status’ there are various entry levels for candidates into the UN:
a graduate school student
a recent graduate
a professional with experience.
The typical opportunity with landing a job at the United Nations for the first category, a graduate school student, is an internship.
For the second category, a recent graduate, the Junior Professional Officers (JPO) posts offer a route into the UN.
To understand how to write internship application documents that stand out, one needs to understand the objective of the United Nations system internship programme; namely, which aims among others to offer graduate and post-graduate students from diverse academic backgrounds:
to expose them to the work of the United Nations, its agencies; and initiatives such as the Sustainable Development Goals SDGs;
to provide the UN Headquarters departments and UN agencies with the assistance of students specialised in various professional fields.
The duration of the internships varies from one UN organization to the other; the United Nations Headquarters Internship Programme for example consists of three two-month periods of the year: spring (mid-January to mid-March), summer (early June to early August), and fall (mid-September to mid-November).
Most internships programmes at the UN system are a full-time programme which means the interns spend five days a week carrying out their assignment under the supervision of a UN staff member.
When creating your cover letter for a UN internship you may also want to take the relevant UN skills and competencies into consideration. The UN differs between UN organizational core values, UN competencies and managerial competencies (such as e.g. leadership). And these differentiations are among others extremely important for your UN job application and UN system interviews.
As a UN employee its key to show commitment towards promoting, protecting, and fulfilling human rights for all. Achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment is a vital part for achieving both, human rights and human development.
To learn more and to understand where and how to reflect those values, competencies and skills in your UN job application, get in touch with one of our professional UN insiders who will advise you on which functional competencies are required for which UN post.
Or download our webinar on how to create a Cover letter or download our Cover letter guide today to help
How to Write a UN Cover Letter – 20-Page Guide with Example and 2025 Sample Cover Letter (PDF Instant Download)
Struggling to write a cover letter for a UN job application? This comprehensive 20-page UN Cover Letter Guide (downloadable PDF) is designed to help you craft a powerful, professional motivation letter tailored to United Nations jobs, JPO positions, consultancies, and other international roles.
What’s inside:
Step-by-step instructions on how to structure your UN cover letter
Insights on how to reflect UN core values and competencies
Tips for using the STAR method in written applications
Common mistakes to avoid in UN motivation letters
A full sample UN motivation letter for inspiration
BONUS: Keywords and phrases that UN hiring managers want to see
Perfect for early-career professionals, career switchers, and experienced applicants looking to improve their UN job application success rate.
📥 Instant download – start improving your UN application today!
Don’t know where to start, how do you structure your cover letter and what key language, UN values, skills and competencies should you reflect? Learn from UCC’s UN insiders that have applied, interviewed and secured UN system roles on how to craft a cover letter that stands out!
We know how you feel, we have been there and know what it takes to start a UN system career.
It can be daunting without any advice and thats why we created our ‘UCC insider guide’.
Published by previous UN system staff with first hand experience of devising cover letters that worked!
Top insider tips on:
what to reflect in your cover letter
how to structure your cover letter
how to draft a cover letter that stands out
what pitfalls and common mistakes to avoid
key words and language to use
tips and insights on how to optimise your cover letter
specific examples & more…
Published by previous UN system staff with first-hand experience of devising cover letters that worked!
Download UCCs 20-page illustrated cover letter guide NOW and save your valuable time searching the internet for answers.
Simply check out using paypal; if you have no paypal account, click ‘pay with paypal’ and then select ‘create account and then simply check out as a guest’.
Learn from UN insiders how to structure and tailor your cover letter to a UN system job vacancy and create an application that stands out and grabs HRs attention!