Designing an impactful JPO orientation experience

“To create something exceptional, your mindset must be relentlessly focused on the smallest detail.”

Giorgio Armani

Twenty years ago, focused on its mandate to equip staff members across the United Nations family with essential skills and capabilities to make the world a better place, UNSSC created the Junior Professional Officers (JPO) Orientation Programme. Since then, this learning offer has had an overarching goal of preparing young professionals for their roles as JPOs across the UN system. By maximizing the wealth of expertise within the UN, this programme endeavors to equip the next generation of UN leaders with the essential tools and perspectives needed for impactful contributions to the various mandates of the many UN agencies and organizations. 

In alignment with the UN’s commitment to foster the development of future leaders, through this programme, UNSSC partners with United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) to equip the JPOs with solid UN system-wide knowledge, skills, and competencies from the outset. These critical skills support JPOs throughout their assignments and enable them to convert knowledge into leadership capabilities as they navigate the UN. These skills are also useful to their future career paths, providing JPOs with the tools to build a career with impact, mobility and the ability to adjust to volatility. Finally, the programme also facilitates inter-agency and inter-donor networking opportunities while nurturing peer-to-peer exchanges. .

Experiential Learning

This year, 100 newly selected JPOs from 10 Member States (Australia, Finland, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland, the United States) embarked on a transformative journey of in person pre-deployment training by UNSSC, held in two editions. The programme brought onboard several vastly experienced resource people and former JPOs, who provided participants with diverse experiential and collaborative learning opportunities. In terms of content, the programme broke down different aspects of serving and navigating the UN, developing communication skills, how to positively influence others, and change and innovation in the UN.

One notable session, titled "Lead like the great conductors," was hosted by Maestro Itay Talgam and employed the use of music, drawing inspiration from history's prominent conductors. This session aimed to create a conducive space for the participants to learn more about themselves and to explore diverse leadership perspectives and styles.  A team-building activity conducted by One Beat, facilitated emotional connections among the JPOs through the ancient art of playing drums and creating beats and songs together. These practices taught JPOs how to foster collaboration and hone essential principles such as empathy, listening, and communication through collective music creation.

The 2023 edition of the programme also incorporated LEGO Serious Play as a learning method and a dynamic tool for dialogue around change and innovation. This interactive methodology allows participants to identify potential challenges and apply collaborative strategies to come up with solutions and actionable insights on a variety of topics, while making extensive use of team collaboration and critical thinking skills. The tangible and visual nature of LEGO Serious Play further facilitates decision-making and problem-solving within any group context, enriching the overall learning experience for the JPO cohort.

Think Like a Designer

Within the comprehensive framework of the programme, participants were also introduced to design thinking as a problem-solving tool. On the last day of the programme, participants were taken on a captivating study tour at the prestigious MAUTO Car Museum in Turin. Then an interactive design thinking workshop was then organized on campus to teach the young professionals how to view their careers from a design thinking perspective, and intentionally build their careers – the same way the great Italian car designers built one of the most robust vehicle systems in the world to date.

In this session, participants were given a deep dive into innovative approaches to design their life and career, set their vision and goals for their JPO journey and to develop actionable ways to get moving towards their goals, fast! Be it analogy thinking, be it prototyping – all are equally relevant to help JPOs reflect on their career goals and make decisions which will lead them towards a fulfilling, adaptable, and sustainable career, even in a world of radical disruption. The training thus helped the JPOs acquire competencies, and ability to make the best of their first 100 days and beyond in their JPO assignment.

As 2023 draws to a close, it is UNSSC’s hope that this orientation programme continues to create a transformative experience that will resonate with the participants throughout their careers in the UN—continuously validating them as forward-thinking leaders and agents of change! We do believe their collective success will shape the future and is central to achieving the vision of UN 2.0.