In today's edition I am excited to share with you an interview with Emiliana Vegas , whom I know and highly value from my time at the Jacobs Foundation where she serves as a Board of Trustee member. She has just recently written a book called "Let's Change the World" where she shares her reflections and recommendations from her career in international organisations.
Emiliana has been highly recognized for her career working to inform education policy in the so-called Global South. She has been a leading economist at the World Bank, division chief of education at the Inter-American Bank, and codirector of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. She is currently a professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Nora: Dear Emiliana, thank you so much for your openness to share some thoughts on your new book. I would like to start with your motivation. I know you're a super busy person. You're teaching at Harvard, you're also sitting and advising on foundation boards, supporting a variety of education initiatives. What motivated you to write a book on successfully navigating a career in international organisations?
Emiliana: I moved to Harvard only two years ago, and it’s less than a year since I started working on the book. Part of the motivation came from my own students who would ask me questions that showed that they really didn't know a lot about international development organizations. And even when they did know their names or their main mandates, they didn't understand how one can get in, or how one can carve a career in there.
And then I got the final push from a mid-career professional who has been working as an entrepreneur and in academia. And he has been working a lot with international development institutions. We had coffee here in Cambridge, and I realized that I had all this information about how these institutions work, what skills you need, and how you navigate them effectively. I concluded that it would be helpful to put it all in writing and help people who are early in their careers, but also mid-career professionals who might want to enter this field. Or for those who are in the field but haven't figured out how to have impact. Through my book I wanted to share with them key reflections around how to navigate these institutions and have impact.
I wanted to encourage people to join the field, and also for them to know how to make the field work for impact.
What key skills and experience should professionals exhibit if they want to pursue a career in international development? What would you recommend to a junior person, and what to an academic mid-career person pursuing such a career?
I think that for all people who want to be effective and impactful in these institutions, there are three critical skills. The first is having very strong analytical skills, being able to sort through a lot of information, quantitative data in particular, but also to rapidly grasp research evidence on what works in education, for example, as in my case.
They should also be to make connections between data and evidence and the problems that the country clients are facing. Academics tend to have good research skills, something that's very valued in international development organizations. Since they are more accustomed to publishing for other academic audiences, I think they tend to have a more difficult time translating those findings to the partner institutions.
This leads to my second important skill, which is communication. I work a lot with my students to help them translate their research and the evidence into documents that anybody can read, whether they’re an expert in economics or in public policy or in education. Having effective communication skills, both in writing and orally, is crucial.
I tell my students that one of the most important goals that one has when you want to change the world, is that you want to persuade others. Ideally you want to persuade them through strong evidence, but also through the way in which you communicate this in a compelling, concise and convincing way.
And lastly, I would say having strong interpersonal and collaboration skills is the third important skill area. In every job I've ever had, I didn't go at it alone. I had to work with others in teams. At times I was the team leader, at times I was a team member. Having the ability to work with others in different roles, with different backgrounds and perspectives, is critical to having an impact.
Thank you, Emiliana. I really like the particular focus for academics on the communication piece, as well as on the teamwork. If we put now our focus to the more junior person that wants to pursue a career in international development: you did a Young Professional Program (YPP) program at the World Bank, I entered the UN system as a Junior Professional Officer (JPO). Are these entry-level programs the only way to enter the international development world, or what would you recommend to those who don’t have such an opportunity at hand?
There are many other paths to international development organizations. There are, for instance, fixed-term appointments. These are usually three- or four-yearlong appointments that are renewable, for example for education specialists, for economists, or for health specialists. A lot of positions open up that are staff positions that have similar compensation and benefits packages to the YPP but are more targeted to a specific expertise skillset. Some of them are for people 32 years old and slightly over it, but many of them are for more senior and experienced professionals.
There are also a lot of short- and extended-term consultancies. As background information - most of these international organizations have fixed staff numbers, but fluctuating workloads. Therefore, they often need to supplement for specific projects or for specific programs with consultants. And I have met so many people at the World Bank and at the Inter-American Development Bank who would tell me, “I started 10 years ago with a three-month contract as a consultant. And here I am 10 years later at the World Bank”.
That’s why I tell, especially more early career professionals who can tolerate a little bit of instability, not to be too risk averse. I started myself at the World Bank when I was a graduate student as a summer intern and then I was a consultant for the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. And those opportunities gave me credibility within the institutions, and I'm sure played a role in my getting into the YPP.
Thanks a lot for highlighting this. I wanted to get back to your previous point on your role as a team member and as a team leader, and how effective communication and collaboration skills are key. I saw that you have dedicated a whole book chapter on people dynamics, and I am curious to hear more about how you've experienced leadership at various stations of your career.
I started my career at the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) even before I got my doctorate. I was working for an education economist, very well known in the field - Luis Crouch - who was one of the most brilliant and yet kind supervisors I could have ever had. He would give me tasks right at the beginning of my internship, and I was mainly learning by doing. At that level, it was very important for me to get feedback in a way that I would incorporate and that I would learn and not feel threatened.
He was a master at saying “the draft you gave me yesterday is fantastic”, and then go line by line, shredding it apart to give me feedback on how it could be improved. But the fact that he started on such a positive note made me feel very appreciated. I've learned throughout my career that giving someone feedback is a gift, it is an act of generosity.
And so, one of the things I say to team leaders, as well as team members, is that as a team leader, you're most effective when you give constructive feedback. Nobody does everything perfectly, but you want to get the best out of everyone. And as a team member, you want to receive feedback as a gift, as a generous act from someone who took the time and cares about your professional development.
Unfortunately, not every supervisor does that. Often, they just can be very blunt and say “this is terrible”, or they just adapt the text themselves, without ever giving you any feedback. I was very fortunate for most of my career to having had supervisors who were both giving me feedback and increasing levels of autonomy, but never before I was ready.
I think good leadership means that it’s a matter of being close enough to know how you support someone to thrive instead of letting someone assume responsibilities that they're not prepared for and therefore might not succeed at. As one of my supervisors at the World Bank once said to me – to be a leader you don't have to do everything, you don't have to know everything, you know your area. And he said it's kind of like a director of an orchestra. You know your instrument, but your role is to envision what the music should sound like and tell all the other players what you're expecting and then let them do their best. And I really took that home as a core message.
That’s a very inspiring picture! Next, I would be interested in why you talk about the “golden handcuffs” in international organizations, and what your recommendations are in dealing with them.
What I mean by golden handcuffs is that the compensation package of most international development organizations as an international staff member tends to be very attractive. A big portion of that attractiveness is due to the pensions upon retirement. And so that's why I call them the golden handcuffs.
It's a term that I learned when I was in the YPP early on from someone who wasn't that much older than me. She was very unhappy in the position that she had been rotated to and didn't seem to have a way out. And she mentioned that “I'm here for at least another 15 years or 20 years because, you know, there's no way I could ever earn as much as I earn here”.
I think I benefitted from the fact that I saw someone like that so early in my career. But also, because, frankly, I always was a little bit ambivalent between pursuing a career in academia or one in international development institutions. I love research. I love applied research – that’s what I discovered at the World Bank early on in my career. And the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank in particular provide great opportunities to do research that is going to be taken up by policymakers in the countries where you work. And so, I felt like as long as I could maintain a foot in academia I would have outside options.
By that, I mean I could do rigorous research that would be published in recognized, peer-reviewed journals and that would also have impact in the countries. I felt like I had an option if I ever wanted to be back in academia to do so. And in this way I avoided the more common career path, which is you're constantly every four- or five-years rotating jobs, but you're never leaving the institution. And eventually, many people become disconnected with their original field of study and professional community. And their whole world becomes that institution or that group of institutions.
I knew that I deeply cared about having an impact in education in developing countries and in particular in Latin America and the Caribbean, my region of origin. I knew that I didn't want to be in a position where I couldn't do that as my profession. So that's why I took the risk of leaving the World Bank to go to the Inter-American Development Bank. And when I did that, I knew that given I had the highest position in education at the IDB that one can have, after I’m going to have to figure out where to go next. It will probably be academia.
And that's what I did. I was lucky I had maintained that connection to the academic world to still be attractive to institutions like Brookings and now Harvard University.
Thanks for those highly valuable reflections. I just recently read an article on how AI might change the internship landscape as the more mundane tasks of writing summary reports, preparing notes or speeches will be partly or fully replaced by AI. What do you think about the hypothesis that with AI being much more widely used, it will be more difficult or less required to have an intern or junior positions in international organisations?
I think AI is definitely changing the nature of how we process and synthesize information, making us much more efficient. Still I think, maybe it's because it's early on, that human capacity to really understand the context and therefore ask AI to ask good questions is a skill that AI is not yet able to replace.
Thus, I think that if you ask AI today to give you the latest on an issue, it might do a pretty good job, but it depends on how sophisticated the issue is. And the problems that international development organizations tackle are generally highly complex. They require a lot of in-depth understanding of the specific context.
To be able to sort through the evidence, which AI can help you with, but then apply it to that context, we are still going to rely on human skill and knowledge. In my experience, at least at the World Bank and the IDB, the interns and the more junior people were supporting more senior people in data analysis and in preparing draft reports, which they can still use AI for. That’s why I think that those entry-level jobs will still be there. But the nature of the work might be made more efficient. And that's why I tell young people to strengthen their data analysis skills, because the quantity of data and information are huge and increasing exponentially.
The speed in which we can analyze information is also increasing, but their value to decision making has never been greater. And so, I think that being able to ask the right questions, being able to have the right data at the right time continues to be a challenge, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. And that’s where we, the skilled professionals in international development organizations, come in!