When you don’t have that much experience it's important to sell yourself to that employer. Say what you can contribute to the organization. Because even if it’s an unpaid internship, they still have to allocate resources. They still have to train you. It's time-consuming and they have to make sure it’s worth their time.
The post-secondary campaign is launched each year in September. You’re invited to write an exam, which is three components. They want to make sure they are recruiting people with excellent judgement. It’s not about your knowledge, whether you studied engineering, or were a doctor and now want to be a foreign service officer; it doesn’t matter what background you have, because it’s based on situational questions versus knowledge-based questions.
The department is always looking for people who speak Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese—those languages that require a lot of language training. So, for those that have those languages, they are definitely an asset.
For me, when I did the interview [to become a foreign service officer] the second time around, I was working in Tunisia for the UN. So, that was an asset because I was actually living abroad. All the international experience proves you’re ready to go anywhere, and you can live in challenging environments. I actually quit my job at the Department of Foreign Affairs as a term employee to take this experience at the UN. And that’s a decision I made that I thought would open more doors to me.
In a short period of time, I’ve had four managers and four different experiences. So it’s not for everybody. You always have to start over, and every time it’s a bit scary. A lot of people are interested in international relations questions and issues. But they really have to ask themselves if they’re just interested in working on that within Canada or if they are actually willing to relocate, because it takes a different type of personality.
It’s nice to have an area of expertise. But we are such a small foreign service, as opposed to France or the UK, that we’re also looking for people who are generalists. People who are willing to move from one region to another, who speak Mandarin (for example) but are willing to learn Spanish. It’s better for your career to develop many areas of expertise and to sell yourself as someone who is adaptable and willing to work in different countries, as opposed to one area.
Insights from Sahar Ghadhban