Investing early: how UNSSC’s orientation for Junior Professional Officers helps shape future UN leaders

Investing early: how UNSSC’s orientation for Junior Professional Officers helps shape future UN leaders

When Ancel Kats entered the United Nations as a Junior Professional Officer almost 20 years ago, he remembers being struck by the scale of the organization.  

The UN was complex, impressive and difficult to read from the outside. As a Junior Professional Officer, he knew he was entering a system with its own rules, hierarchies, pace and language.

For many Junior Professional Officers, this is the starting point. They arrive with strong academic backgrounds, motivation and technical skills, but often with limited understanding of how the UN system works in practice. They must learn quickly how mandates translate into daily work, how decisions happen, how procedures shape delivery, and how to contribute with confidence in a large multilateral bureaucracy.

The shift: learning the system before navigating it

UNSSC’s JPO Orientation Programme is designed to respond to that need. As the UN system’s inter-agency induction for newly recruited JPOs, it provides a common foundation before young professionals begin or continue their assignments across agencies and duty stations.

Since 2003, UNSSC has been delivering tailored orientation programmes to support JPOs entering the United Nations system and affiliated organizations. What began as a two-week, face-to-face pilot for 44 participants has evolved into a flagship, system-wide induction offering that has reached more than 1,500 JPOs sponsored by Member States over the past two decades.

The programme combines system-wide knowledge with practical skills. Through discussions, case studies, simulations and collaborative activities, JPOs learn about the UN’s structures, standards and procedures, while also developing skills that matter in daily work: communication, negotiation, influencing, managing upwards, resilience, safety and security, and work-life balance.

For Agbessi Komla Amewoa, now World Food Programme (WFP) Country Director and Representative in Liberia, the orientation in Turin in 2007 remains a defining moment.

That understanding matters because JPOs are not entering a single organization. They are entering a system. The orientation helps them see beyond their first post, agency or supervisor, and understand the wider institutional environment they are becoming part of.

What changed in practice

Some of the impact is immediate and practical.

Ancel remembers the technical sessions on administration, human resources and presentation skills as directly useful. As a new JPO, he joked, “you’re basically Mr. PowerPoint.” But beneath the humour was a serious point: young professionals are often asked to turn complex information into briefings, presentations and decision-ready products very early in their assignments.

That practical mindset later shaped how he worked on emergency preparedness. In West Africa, he saw that inter-agency contingency plans were often long, text-heavy documents that risked ending up in drawers. His question was simple: if an emergency happened tomorrow, what would colleagues actually need?

The answer was simple - a clear, usable checklist. He helped redesign contingency planning templates into more practical tools focused on essential information and faster decision-making under pressure. This was a field-driven improvement by someone who understood both the system and the need to make it work better in practice.

The leadership habits that stay

The longer-term impact of early learning can be harder to measure, but it may be the most important.

For Agbessi, one lesson from Turin stayed with him throughout his career: listen to people at every level of the organization. He remembers being taught not to underestimate general service staff, national colleagues, assistants or drivers, because they often hold the institutional memory and practical knowledge that determines whether work succeeds or fails.

Today, that lesson is visible in his leadership style. As a country director, he describes an open-door approach where staff can speak to him regardless of grade, contract type, nationality or background. He sees listening as a management tool that prevents conflict, builds trust and improves delivery.

In one duty station, he arrived in an office marked by frustration and strained relationships. Agbessi began by meeting staff, listening to concerns and addressing misunderstandings before they hardened into deeper conflict. Within weeks, he said, the atmosphere began to change. “When people feel comfortable and have psychological safety, they are prone to contribute more,” he reflected.

This is where the return on early investment becomes visible. A lesson heard by a young JPO in Turin becomes, years later, a leadership practice in a country office. A principle about listening becomes a way to manage conflict. A training memory becomes part of how teams are led.

Why it matters

JPOs often become part of a highly motivated cadre of professionals who continue to carry strong standards across the system. Ancel is clear about the value of investing in them. “If my supervisor ever asks me: Ancel, would you like to have a JPO in your team? I’ll say yes, of course,” he said. “That JPO will be doing the work of two or three other people.”

His point is not simply that JPOs work hard. It is that early investment can shape professional identity. When young officers learn how the system works, build networks across agencies, understand standards and procedures, and develop the confidence to contribute, they are better equipped to become the kind of colleagues and leaders the UN system needs.

Agbessi makes the same argument from a leadership perspective. In his view, shaping people at the beginning of their UN careers is “a very good investment in terms of long-term impact on the organization and its mandate.”

The first weeks of a UN career do not stay in the first weeks. They travel with people into field offices, headquarters, emergency operations, country leadership and team culture.

Investing early is, therefore, not a small induction exercise. It is a way of strengthening the UN system before its future leaders know they will become its future leaders.