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As graduation season approaches, international affairs students and professionals are navigating a transformed job market. Last summer, our team sat down with Sara Jones, the director of the SIS Office of Career Development, about interviewing strategies on our Big World podcast. Given today’s evolving job landscape, the core skills that SIS graduates develop remain in high demand across diverse sectors and our graduates continue to find meaningful opportunities by leveraging their versatile education and our robust SIS support network. We reconnected with Jones to get the latest guidance for those seeking new career opportunities in global affairs.

Given the federal layoffs, how has the Career Development Office adapted its services to meet these new challenges?

As soon as the stop-work orders came down, our team immediately jumped into action to figure out how we can best serve our community. Since then, we’ve heard from nearly 300 SIS alumni and students so far who have had positions terminated or offers rescinded. To support them:

• We created a Federal Worker Support page with resources on unemployment, career sector transitions, open jobs right now, and more.
• We crowdsourced more than 150 open positions this spring from our community that we’ve shared directly back with those impacted, plus helped connect those searching with over a dozen alumni who offered to support job searches right now.
• We developed responsive events, including “Where are Opportunities in Intelligence Right Now?” and “Where are Opportunities in Development and Social Impact Right Now?”
• We added additional drop-in advising options, including a weekly group advising hour specifically for those who have been laid off due to recent federal changes.

The development sector has been hit especially hard. What advice do you have for professionals in that area who may have lost a job or are dealing with uncertainties?

We just added a section to our Federal Worker Support page on exactly this (note: you will need an AU login to access this document): ��(and using relevant skills)! In this section, you will find suggestions of agencies and organizations that are either not affected or less so by these federal changes, where the work is still very relevant and important. We also provide some steps, suggested AI prompts you can use to help you in your search, as well as advice to make you more competitive in this job market.

Lean on your network; use the skills you developed at SIS to be flexible in the field. And come to our team – our events, our drop-in sessions, our resources.

Networking appears to be more important than ever in today’s competitive environment. How can job seekers leverage professional connection? What networking resources does your office/our SIS community provide?

Networking is always an integral part of a successful job search, and even more valuable during more competitive times. Our SIS career team has connections with thousands of alumni at different employers—we love introducing students to them and offering support for strong informational interviews. Follow the steps in our online networking step-by-step guide, starting by identifying up to 5 employers of interest and asking us if we have any connections to them.

For those concerned about career stability, what would you say is the long-term value of our degree programs and SIS community as a whole?

The vital global challenges that SIS degree programs prepare students to work on across the environment, development, foreign policy, peace and conflict resolution, governance, and more, are not going away—they’re just moving. While there are fewer opportunities in the federal government right now, the work continues at the state and local level, in the private sector, in non-profits, and multilaterals. Having adaptable professionals ready to face these challenges in a variety of contexts is more important than ever.

To this end, the SIS community is absolutely invaluable. Nowhere else will you find such a genuinely service-oriented group who is passionate about helping the world and each other—especially during challenging times. This spring, the community has really showed up for its own, offering jobs they were hiring for, job search support, and more. They are our heart, and we’re so grateful!