Allie tells us why you should be offended if a British person says your idea is "interesting" - and how things can get lost in translation in a cross-cultural environment.

Allie tells us how being Canadian helps her act as mediator in discussions between American and British colleagues.

Allie describes how her previous experience helps set her apart from her competition.

Find out what Allie saw inside of an old warehouse, that convinced her she had to put her journalism work on the back burner, and pursue a new career path.

The verdict is in: some level of post-secondary education is key to getting hired... but there is more to it than that.

The verdict is in: some level of post-secondary education is key to getting hired... but there is more to it than that.

Abilities that will help you succeed? Definitely being resilient, open to learning about new cultures; checking your own biases and making sure you’re not ethnocentric, and you’re very aware of your privilege and your background. You have to be able to laugh. There are lots of times I’m picked on for how I pronounce things, or for how little I still understand about the country even though I’ve been here for six months. Be willing to learn, willing to make friends quickly, and be open to accepting every invitation that comes around. I did a unique Masters program, that was very applied; it was almost college-like. An example of a class I took was impact evaluation, so learning how to conduct a development project and then learning how to evaluate it so it can be scaled up. So, for example, implementing a new curriculum in rural schools, in only a few areas, and then determining if it worked and you had a good result, and then seeing where it could be a province-wide or nationwide program. The Canadian government has an incredible internship program. It’s called the International Youth Internship Program, IYIP. It has internships for people under 30, and you only need a college degree or university degree and no prior experience. They will send you to a developing country for six months, and pay for your learning experience. You don’t have to study development or political science or sociology beforehand. They send people who are interested in the environment; they send people who are interested in computer science; they send mathematicians. Everybody has something to offer in development. I think that’s what so unique about the field I work in. Global Affairs Canada is our big ministry of foreign affairs, trade and development; it’s all amalgamated into one. I did work on the development side when the amalgamation was new. It had a policy section, so I was working on what Canada’s policies, what our stances on development were in international bodies, for example the G7 or the G20. The other side would be our operations and programming, so giving out grants to NGOs, and monitoring them, ensuring they had a gender component and an environmental component, and developing relationships with the NGOs that are on the ground conducting those projects. At World Vision, which is such a large NGO, there are so many different areas you can become involved in. We work in education, for example, running after school programs. We also work in health where we’re trying to improve sanitation of children in Mongolia; we work with mothers, doing pre-natal classes. We also work on disaster risk reduction, Mongolia is prone to earthquakes, so we get people ready for that, teach how to prepare for that. Or simple things like fire, how to stop, drop and roll. But that’s just programming. We also have accountants, who check all of the books and make sure we’re spending properly; we have procurement officers who find the best companies to work with. And then, we have our strange team working on building relationships with the private sector to get Mongolians helping other Mongolians. We also have communications, so if you’re interested in taking pictures and videos, we need people to capture the essence of our work, and communicate that to donors so they can understand where their money is going. So it’s quite a multifaceted field.

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.

One of the big things you learn in engineering, after four years of cramming for exams and having all these labs to do, is that you learn how to learn new things. That’s the biggest skill that transfers over. Every day I’m asked to look into things that are new to me—but I’ve been in that place before. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. And, when you don’t know the answer, don’t give a BS answer, to avoid looking bad in front of others—that snowballs into people not wanting to ask questions when they don’t know something. So, one of my biggest tips to succeed is just to be honest about what you know and what you don’t know. The Dutch are super nice people and super great, but it will always be better if you learn Dutch. There are lots of people that I would see here and there, and speak to in English, but in the past six months that I’ve been learning Dutch and speaking to those same people—they’re like whole new people. They have better conversations, they make jokes, and I don’t feel like there’s this timer that after 15 minutes they don’t want to keep talking. That Monday after the interview, I sent him an email with three solved puzzles and said, “ It didn’t go as well as planned [during the interview] last Friday, I hope this makes up for it.” He really liked that I did that, and that’s how I got the job. A bit of perseverance.