With the aggressive, immoral, and short-sighted destruction of foreign aid, I’ve been trying to focus my energy to comprehend and react to the scale of this disaster by helping where I can. In practice, this has been a lot of conversations supporting the immediate and tangible job loss needs of some of the most selfless and dedicated people I’ve had the pleasure to work with. As the development sector pivots and looks for opportunities in the private sector, I have noticed I’ve been a bit of a broken record on a few topics, but none more so than the incredible skills that every single human who’s worked in development innately has and probably doesn’t even think about - but yet they are rare and valuable skills which are learned only from experience. I’m trying to document those here.
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Project Management: You can look at a problem and quickly have a feel for what timelines, skills, and overall levels of effort it will take to build a project to resolve it. Maybe you use project management tools, charts, or whatnot, maybe not, but building a timeline and delivering against that with clear measurement, communication, and impact is just in your blood. Timelines, reporting lines, internal politics, and almost everything else is different in the private sector - but the core skill of scoping and solving is the important one.
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Related to this is working on multiple levels of abstraction Understanding how things connect and ladder up to a broader strategic outcome is core to successful development projects - workshops must run, funding must flow, reports must happen. These take detailed logistics and operational work, but build together to create a project and drive a change as part of a larger program, housed in an overall mission to achieve a goal. Understanding where there is flexibility to still meet outcomes – and where there is not – is an incredibly valuable mindset. Being able to map impact and manage prioritization across multiple levels: operationally (getting logistics done), tactically (how to change this project’s task to work better), and strategically (how does this advance a mission) gives you a vantage point that others won’t have.
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You thrive, and drive Excellence amidst chaos: Have you managed a project where every single wheel came off, nothing went right, partners flaked, stakeholders got angry, and the world changed around you – and you still landed it? Honestly - have you ever /not/ had a project with one or more of those happening? Dig up some spectacular failures that you managed your way through to success for your interviews, these are gold.
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You dream in timezones: You have stared at calendars and timezone calculators so long that you know what magic hour you can (painfully) get everyone around the world on one call, you instinctively feel when Europe and Africa should be going offline for the day, and you know how to weave in 12 hour time zone differences into a project flow. Working asynchronously but equitably across the entire world is just how you do things. Guess what - big companies are global, with offices and staff you’ll need to work with in all corners of the world. Having demonstrated competency in not only the mechanics of working across timezones, but how to actually run global projects and processes, meetings, and drive engagement with short timelines is going to get daily exercise.
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Clear, global communication and meaningful inclusion: Closely related and even more important - you know the value of local knowledge, and respect divergent viewpoints coming from different positions, cultures, and pressures. You deeply understand power dynamics and how those play out and can be subverted. Hey, guess what - especially if you are on a “central” or “global” / HQ role, being able to work with colleagues coming from different places, understand why their position is what it is - will make you a miracle worker in difficult internal negotiations, as well as in external engagements.
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Complicated relationships and deep context is your jam This doesn’t just apply to working globally, but among different internal teams. Managing “XFNs” - cross functional networks, often with unclear power dynamics, fuzzy or self-created formal structure, and different leadership pressures and resource constraints - is how you get things done. It’s complicated, messy, and requires, well, the sixth sense of empathy, curiosity, and relationship building that you’ve created working with new partners, complicated funder/grantee relationships, and the vast world of “coopetition” of competing interests and organizations – aligned on goals, but still competing among themselves also.
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Events and facilitating is just a thing you do: This was another thing that I found I just did because I had to - from building massive conferences to targeted training events, you have a feel for an event flow, timing, how long things take, and how to roll with schedule disasters. You can drive logistics while also creating a narrative arc of the event to bring the attendees to a fruitful outcome. This is actually pretty rare, and it gives you an edge in everything from designing meeting agendas to creating innovative internal and external engagements for your work.
And now for some things you probably were hoping to escape from:
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Let’s get this out of the way now: Proposal Writing: - I know you thought you’d escaped, but pitching a project, landing internal support/resourcing/etc, and building buy-in is frighteningly similar to short proposals. More importantly, the painful work of condensing a complicated idea to a one paragraph summary is an absolute critical skill for executive communication, where you need to convey an accurate overview of truly gnarly, nuanced problems in an incredibly tight delivery.
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M&E You will (mostly) not have to build out a metrics table or do formal quarterly reports, but creative, pragmatic ideas on how to measure success is always a win. I’ve found the ability to bring structure qualitative work, and broadly bringing order to chaos, is an undervalued (or perhaps just a baseline, invisible) skill in development, but powerful in the private sector. That said, I have conversations that give me metrics design PTSD on a weekly basis.
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Budgeting - Being able to sketch out a rough-order-of-magnitude project budget with all the “around the corner” type learnings from non profit budget processes is just straight up valuable and actually a bit rare of a skill. Honestly unless you want to get Really In To budget work, keep that on lock down, but know it’s yet another edge you have.