Expectations vs. Reality: What to expect after graduation?
Expectations vs. Reality: What to expect from your first role after graduating from university?
Congratulations! You’ve earned your degree, now get the experience!
One of the most common questions students and recent graduates have when they come to seek our support is:
What should I do after graduating? How long does it take to get a job after graduating college? What should I expect after high school graduation? How do I decide what to do after university?
To answer these questions, we think it is important to know what to expect from your first job or paid internship?
Well, besides your first job hopefully being a great experience, it’s also a good chance to get your foot in a UN system organisation and potentially longer term a permanent job. In addition, it’s a huge advantage to have a UN reference on your CV which may help you with your future career endeavours. Plus, it’s an opportunity for you to discover new parts of the world, new cultures and people.
But what are the most common tasks required of a junior professional role with the United Nations system and/or a UN internship?
While the “UN” is not one big employer and activities differentiate from one UN organisation to the other, there are usually two categories of activities conducted by a UN system intern:
Administrative Support & Research Activities
You will hardly find any internship that doesn’t require administrative support activities. The most common admin tasks involved are for example preparing power point presentations, attending meeting and taking notes, support the preparation of events, meetings, trainings, provide input to various internal documents and possibly outreach materials.
Research activities are also quite common and usually entail tasks related to researching various topics from different sources, gathering data and information from other departments, sections and/or UN organisations, cataloguing information, analysing information as well as drafting and revising documents based on the collected information.
Finding the ‘right’ UN system organisation that matches your profile, education, skills and competencies, can lead to a fulfilling career where you get the chance to leave an important impact on the world. It means working with people from all over the world, getting to know different cultures and strengthening your multicultural team working skills while working on a good cause for human mankind and our planet.
UCC aims to share insights and advice to increase your chances of an international career and to address the lack of knowledge about how and where to apply for the various UN system organisations; UCC offers FREE blog articles, webinars and other services to enable you to access information about the different application, recruitment and selection processes as well as to help you get your UN system related questions answered.
Get in touch and connect with current and former UN staff to learn from those that have applied, interviewed and secured UN system roles.