What exactly is an overlooked career type?
You don’t know what you don’t know

When kids are asked that they want to be when they grow up, you’ll often hear answers like, fireman, teacher, President of the United States. When asked in high school, the common responses you might get are, TV broadcaster, lawyer, doctor, movie director, millionaire.
Choosing a career is something that just sounds active, like you have an exact job title in mind when someone asks you what you’d like to do for a living. This might be more transparent in certain fields, like medicine or law. There a distinct echelons in those professional fields and institutions that one needs to pass. But for niche industries (or even newly created ones), you won’t know the titles until you actual enter that job space first. So in college, even when you’ve chosen a field of study, it’s hard to the answer the question “What would you like to do?,” because you don’t know what you don’t know.
Well-known career types in IR
In the political and international relations fields, outside of elected official, campaign manager and professor, job titles are quite mysterious. It doesn’t help that you frequently see “Fellow” “Analyst” or “Deputy Director” as someone’s title in this field. I mean, what the heck is that?
I’ve mentored many undergrads and recent graduates, and a fairly typical career interest is to be a diplomat, work at the United Nations, or influence foreign policy somehow. What I try to do is to shed light on these particular career paths, and to give them more vocabulary about the different titles and roles that are out there.
Beyond career types, most people interested in international affairs hone in on a particular organization that they think does cool work. Amnesty International, the UN, Oxfam, Greenpeace are ones we learn about earliest. And the more we study or work in the field, our constellation of cool organizations widens. Understanding the organizational landscape of an career type is one of the most popular Sessions I hold with my mentees. Do you know the main foundations and INGOs working in conflict resolution and peacekeeping? Or in democracy-building?
Discovering an Overlooked Career type
The best thing about starting out in a new job or changing careers is discovering all the interesting things that people do to make an organization run smoothly. There are so many moving parts and one person may be doing tons of things that deserve more than the one title they have. And for me, an overlooked career type is a role that you may have never heard about, but you can’t imagine how an organization or company would survive without it.
We highlighted four overlooked career types in IR in our blog last month: grant writer, disaster recovery coordinator, international sales manager, and regulatory affairs specialist. They are not as glamorous as “Diplomat”, but they sit squarely in a dynamic lane of liaising with decision-makers in government and business. It’s the kind of career type with influence and impact, and I believe why a lot of people choose to study international relations in the first place.
Reading the article made me realize that I didn’t know many job titles in International Relations until I started interning at a UN advocacy non-profit and then later when I started my PhD. Governments and international policy-making is a black-box, and until we talk more openly about the kinds of careers that exist, we’ll keep discovering that most careers in IR are overlooked career types.
