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