Becoming a humanitarian, where to start?

How do you become a humanitarian, medic or otherwise?

How do you find jobs? Do you need experience? Where to start?

Many questions a lot of you ask me. Eventhough we have the internet, it seems this only makes it even harder sometimes. You can definitely lose yourself in the world wide web, and there is not such a things as a database for medical jobs in the humanitarian field.

For non-medical, there is Reliefweb, with general information about humanitarian work and news updates, but also vacancies: https://reliefweb.int/jobs.

To start with, I did make a list with organisations I know of, see my other blog: https://www.humanitarianmedicine.com/post/humanitarian-organisations.

So how to start?

1. What do you want? Think about what kind of project your hearts starts pumping faster for. It doesn't have to be extraordinary to begin with. What group of people do you want to help? Does it has to be medical or not per se?

2. Where do you want to work? Closer to home (also many needs!), the Netherlands, Europe, another continent? If you search in google on a region, for instance: Calais (FR) and NGO, you will find the NGO's that work there and can search on their websites. You might not always find these organisations if you search on job offers and NGO's.

3. Look on the website for vacancies and requirments for the jobs.

4. If there isn't a vacancy published, don't stop there! Lots of very recent vacancies aren't published online. So if you are interested, ALWAYS send an email and ask for an open job applying procedure. If there isn't any, ask if they know other organisations that seek people. And secondly follow the NGO on their social media channels, for new job offers being posted of referrals to other NGO's.

5. Lastly: never give up!

   
   

   Good luck!