Outreach to Universities Programme

The Department for General Assembly and Conference Management of the United Nations is facing a set of interrelated challenges that can be effectively addressed only through an integrated approach encompassing succession and workforce planning (which for language posts entails a number of unique examinations and recruitment issues, as well as the need to interact with universities, training institutions and professional associations with the aim of increasing the supply of qualified and well-prepared potential recruits); training for language staff at various critical stages of their careers, including support for continuous learning and the upgrading of substantive and technical skills; and measures to ensure that the Department's outputs continue to meet the highest standards of quality, as repeatedly called for by the Member States, including steps to ensure the transmission of institutional memory from the generation of language professionals who are now reaching the age of retirement to the new recruits who are taking their places.

The overall vacancy rate at the four DGACM duty stations stands at 14.2% for interpreters and 12.9% for translators. When projected retirements in the period 2010-2016 are factored in, total turnover will reach 42.9% for interpreters and 40.1% for translators (table is available upon request). In absolute numbers this means that the competitive examinations will have to produce 119 new recruits in interpretation and 217 for translation in the period in question. Particularly hard hit will be the English interpretation booth (53.3%) followed closely by the French (48.8%), Arabic (44.2%), and Russian (43.9%) booths, with only Chinese undergoing a turnover of less than 30% (29.4%). All of the translation units will continue to experience high turnover, ranging from a low of 31.2% of the workforce (Arabic) to a high of 46.8% (English). To put this demographic transition into broader perspective, in the Secretariat as a whole, a total of 1,720 staff will reach the mandatory age of separation during the period 2009-2013, or 13% of the staff members holding a 100-series appointment. In the next four and a half years, an average of 382 staff will retire each year. The situation with the turnover of language staff is clearly more acute, all the more so that replacements can be recruited only through the competitive examinations.

Confronted with difficulties in recruiting qualified language staff in order to offset the large number of retirements and to ensure continued highest quality servicing of the multilingual communication processes at the UN, DGACM has been compelled to take a proactive approach, which includes outreach to the educational community and introduction of systematic and structured training of newly recruited and serving staff. The next step is now to integrate all activities related to its strategic goals in the area of workforce succession planning. These goals are identifying, attracting, testing, recruiting, training and retaining high-caliber language professionals, as well as ensuring preservation of the institutional memory of the DGACM language services.

At 2009 Coordination Meeting of the UN Conference Managers, Tunis, Tunisia, 2-3 July 2009, all duty stations of DGACM agreed that outreach to potential pools of language workforce, including provision of direct pedagogical assistance to schools of Interpretation and Translation, and training of internal language staff, are major parts of the United Nations succession planning strategy in the field of conference management and DGACM’s contribution into the UN Management Reform geared at identifying, orienting, recruiting and conditioning a mobile, multi-skilled and motivated staff corps. As the shortages of qualified language services providers are of a global nature because all duty stations recruit language staff from a common limited pool of qualified human resources, they recognized the succession planning to be an important common problem requiring coordinated and innovative solutions.

These activities have been supported and mandated by member-states. In its resolution 64/230, General Assembly requested the Secretary General to continue to address the issue of succession planning by enhancing internal and external training programmes, developing staff exchange programmes among organizations and participating in outreach to institutions that train language staff for international organizations. In response to this call, DGACM on behalf of the United Nations signs Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) with the leading universities around the world, on cooperation in preparing candidates for competitive language examinations. The current list of educational institutions that have signed the MoU with the United Nations on cooperation in preparing candidates for competitive language examinations is available here.