Getting a job at the World Health Organization

Hello and welcome back to the Global Health YouTube channel. My name is Greg Martin. This video forms part of a series of videos in which we're looking at work opportunities and career options for people that are interested in global health. In today's video, we're going to take a look at the World Health Organization. Just on a personal note, I haven't posted a video on YouTube for a little while now and the reason is I've gotten married. I'm now a married man. I have a ring on my finger and I've just spent a week in Cape Town on a honeymoon. I'm now back in Dublin town and back in Singapore. Probably worth me mentioning that I don't currently work at the World Health Organization. Certainly, I'm not representing them in this video. Nothing that I'm saying has specifically been endorsed by the WHO. I did work at the World Health Organization and I'm going to talk a little bit about the things that I like, the things that I didn't like and the process of applying for a job. I worked at the WHO in Geneva which is the headquarters and so a lot of what I'm going to talk about pertains specifically to working at the WHO headquarters in Geneva and in follow-up videos, we'll talk about working for country offices and regional offices but we're not going to cover that in this video. The first is, of course, that the work that you're doing at the WHO will be tremendously interesting and I'm not going to talk too much about that. I think that it stands to reason. The fact that you're watching this video means that you're probably interested in global health issues, etc. So I'm going to leave that point one as a given. The second point is that the WHO do pay well. If you get a job in Geneva at the WHO, not only do you get your pay but you get compensation for the fact that Geneva is an expensive city to live in. They also have health insurance. They have an excellent pension package but that is contingent on you having worked there for a certain period of time. By and large, there are differences in terms of the remuneration depending on what kind of package you're on and that's probably a bit too complex for us to get into in this video. I will put together a subsequent video where we look at that in a little bit more detail. The third point is that if you're working for the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Geneva is a fantastic city to live in. It's a beautiful city. It's close to the Alps so you can go skiing in the winter. There's lots of sports in the summertime. It's French-speaking so if you're wanting to learn how to speak French, it's a great place to learn to speak French. If you don't speak French, it's the kind of city that you can get away with just English. So by and large, Geneva is a fantastic place to live and if you move there, you'll enjoy it. And added to that, and perhaps related to the previous point about the pay package etc, when you move to Geneva, depending on the contract that you're on, but I think by and large, you do get a relocation expense package so the WHO pay for you to relocate to Geneva. And of course, working at the WHO is an excellent career stepping stone. So it's a great place to network. You'll meet interesting people. You'll get to know people working in all sorts of different nooks and crannies in the global health space. You'll develop a whole lot of skill sets and understand the architecture of global health and who's doing what and what the different stakeholders are up to. So it's a great place to learn about global health. It's a great place to expand and extend your set of capabilities and skills and it's a great place to network. It goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, I'm assuming that you're interested in working at the WHO because you're interested in making the world a better place. And so I'm not going to include that as a bullet point. I'm going to take that as a given. In the interest of balance, I'm going to talk a little bit about what the downside of working at the WHO is. The first point on the list of downside issues with respect to working at the WHO is, in my opinion, they seem to have a defunct promotion mechanism. In other words, a person working at a certain level, let's say, for example, you're a P3 or a P4, there's not an obvious career path within which you could get promoted to a more senior position simply based on your performance at the level that you've been working. Let's say, for example, you're working as a P4 and you're wanting to get promoted. The mechanism just to promote you from a P4 to a P5 doesn't really exist, or if it does exist, I never came across such a mechanism. So again, let me just reiterate that I'm not representing the WHO now, this is just my experience. What tends to happen is a person working at a P4 level wants to get promoted to a different role, a more senior role, will need to apply for a position at that more senior role. That in and of itself isn't too problematic but we'll talk about the problems that it creates in the application process for other people. So the application process to the WHO is a little bit unethical. It's worth mentioning that if you're going to work at the WHO in Geneva, the work that you're going to be doing is going to be relatively admin-intensive. In other words, if you're a public health professional and what you're wanting to do is rush around Africa with a stethoscope and syringe, this is probably not the kind of work that you're going to be interested in. Working at the WHO involves a lot of putting together documents and presentations and working with PowerPoint and putting together spreadsheets and budgets and thinking through processes. And if you're interested in field work and really getting stuck in and hands-on work at the coalface, this is probably not the kind of work that's going to interest you. If you're working at the WHO, what it is that you can and can't do or what it is that the WHO can and can't do is certainly constrained by the fact that the WHO is representing the interests of its member states. I'm not going to talk in this video about the strengths and weaknesses of the WHO as an institution. I think that we'll cover that in a future video, but it's probably worth mentioning that that can be a point of frustration for people that are working within the organisation itself. And of course, the WHO recruitment process itself is rather enigmatic. On the surface, it looks pretty straightforward, but the reality of it is a little bit more complex than that. So let's take a look at that one. If you're applying for a job at the WHO, the job that's advertised may already have an incumbent. And the reason I'm telling you this is so that you don't become disheartened if you've applied for one or maybe more positions at the WHO and never heard back from them or heard back from them and haven't interviewed, but despite feeling that you're an excellent candidate, you never got the job or you never got the jobs that you applied for. There are really two reasons why this happens. And the first reason relates to what we were talking about a minute ago, and that is that within the WHO, there's no obvious career path or there's no obvious career planning that I was aware of. People don't have the opportunity to necessarily get promoted up into a position. They need to apply for a position. And so what you get is within the WHO, you get a person that maybe leaves or resigns or isn't there anymore. Somebody within the organization that's already there fulfills that role. They do the job. They get up in the morning and they do whatever it was that the previous person was doing. That role is then advertised. And while it's being advertised, there's already a human being that's getting up every morning and doing that job. So there is an incumbent. That person is likely to apply for that position themselves. And they will, in my experience and in my opinion, they will more than likely will get that job. And so outsiders applying for the same position who don't know that there's an incumbent and there's a person working in that role already, it's seemingly a very small chance of getting that position. The second reason why there may be an incumbent in the position that you're applying for is if there's this vacancy, there's something that's needing to be done. There may be somebody that has been temporarily put into that position from the outside. There may be a consultant. There may be a short-term staff or what they call a temporary staff. And that position can get filled without an advert, but only for a limited period of time. After which to make that position more permanent, to give that person a longer term contract, the job has to be advertised. And so that job will be advertised despite the fact that there's already somebody there. Other people will apply, but in reality, all these extra candidates are less likely to get the job than the person that's already doing the job. The last thing I'm going to talk about in terms of applying for work at the WHO is the number of years of experience that you've clocked up in order to become eligible for a particular position. And there's more issues than this, but I think we're going to have to deal with them in subsequent videos to try and keep this short and concise and to the point. So as you enter your CV in online, the whole thing's done using an online portal, make sure that you reflect your experience in a way that demonstrates that you have worked in the area that they're looking for for the required period of time. I hope you found this video useful. I'm certainly going to make more videos about working at the WHO and more videos about working at other institutions and organizations in the global health space. Remember that you can subscribe to this channel, and if you do so, you'll get an email update whenever there's a new video posted. If you're watching this video on YouTube or Google+, please make comments below. I will respond to comments and questions that people make and ask. And remember to go ahead and share this video with other people that you think might be interested in and send it out on Twitter, Facebook. So until next time, thanks for watching. It's been real. Don't ever change. Don't do drugs. Always do your best. Speak to you soon. Take care.