Professional Development
Practical guidance for people building a career in NGOs and development organisations: what to learn, how to lead, which qualifications carry weight, and how to fund your own development. Written to be useful whether or not you have an account with us.
Building your career
CVs and cover letters
Learning and qualifications
- Check what the role actually requires. Read the person specification, not the job title. Separate the must-haves from the preferred list and apply accordingly. A qualification listed as preferred is not a requirement.
- Prefer evidence over credentials. For most NGO roles, a documented project you led is more persuasive than a certificate you sat once. Where a qualification is genuinely required — clinical practice, engineering, accounting, safeguarding — treat it as a gate, not a differentiator.
- Short courses suit short gaps. When you need one specific skill, a focused course with assessed work is more useful than a broad programme, and easier to evidence in an application.
- Check whether a qualification is recognised. Before enrolling, confirm the awarding body is recognised in the country where you intend to work. Ask an employer in that market directly if you are unsure.
- Keep a record as you go. Note dates, hours and outcomes while the work is fresh. Reconstructing this later takes longer than keeping it.
Leadership
- Lead the outcome, not the activity. Agree with your team what change you are trying to produce, then choose the activities. Activity targets are easy to hit and easy to criticise.
- Write down decisions. Keep a short decision log: what was decided, why, who was consulted, when it should be reviewed. It protects the organisation and it protects you.
- Budget for the things nobody funds. Translation, transport, data entry, safeguarding checks and staff supervision all draw on real time. If they are not in the workplan, someone absorbs them silently.
- Give feedback you would want to receive. Specific, soon after the event, and about behaviour rather than character.
- Build a successor deliberately. If you are the only person who can do something, that is a risk to the organisation, not an asset to you.
Interviews
Finding work
Support
Our services page offers CV writing and career coaching for NGO professionals, with CV and LinkedIn upgrades available on their own. The Job Search Pro plan goes further: CV, cover letter and LinkedIn upgrades, handpicked job alerts, and personalized job search and interview coaching.
A note on funding announcements. Time-limited funding opportunities — scholarships, fellowships, bursaries and training places — are published here only while their application window is open, and are removed once it closes. A page advertising last year’s deadline is worse than no page at all, because it looks current. Retired links respond with 410 Gone and point back to this page. If you are looking for a specific scheme, check the awarding organisation’s own website for the current cycle and deadline before you apply.