There is a small sentence in many UN vacancy notices that does a lot of work.
"A minimum of five years of progressively responsible experience in..."
Or seven. Or ten. Or "relevant experience in programme management, policy analysis, partnerships, operations, finance, procurement, data systems, humanitarian coordination", and so on until the reader begins to suspect the sentence has been paid by the comma.
Candidates often read that line and ask one question: does my experience count?
The honest answer is: it depends.
There is a reason the answer is slippery. "Relevant" is doing several jobs at once. It can mean relevant to the subject matter, relevant to the function, relevant to the level of the post, relevant to the institutional setting, and relevant under the organisation's formal screening rules.
That is why two candidates with the same number of years can be treated very differently.
One person's eight years may look like eight solid years for the vacancy. Another person's eight years may be counted as four, two, or not much at all. It may feel brutal in ordinary human terms. In formal recruitment, it's everyday reality.
Relevant to what?
The first mistake is to treat "relevant experience" as a synonym for "work experience."
If a vacancy asks for seven years in human rights reporting, seven years in general communications will not automatically satisfy it. If a role is about procurement under donor rules, general office administration may help but may not carry the same weight. If the post is a P-4 management role, years spent doing similar thematic work at a junior support level may not be good enough even for a fraction of what's needed.
Your experience rarely has to match the vacancy word for word.
The better test is whether you have real evidence of comparable work.
Have you handled similar problems? Worked with similar stakeholders? Managed similar resources? Written the same kind of analysis? Delivered in the same kind of field setting? Used the same regulations, tools or technical language? Operated under similar political, donor, security or institutional constraints?
A title helps only if it points to the work. A famous employer helps only if the duties are close enough. A long career helps only if the relevant parts are visible.
Years are not enough
HR screening can be nauseatingly literal about years. If the minimum is seven years, the file normally needs to show seven years that can be defended as relevant.
This is where candidates sometimes get surprised.
They may have twelve years of work history, but only six years after the degree the vacancy requires. They may have ten years in the broad sector, but only three years doing the function the post is really about. They may have strong field exposure, but not enough of it at the level the vacancy expects.
In many UN-style processes, professional experience is counted from the first required degree. If the vacancy requires a first-level university degree, the clock may start there. If it requires an advanced degree, the rules may allow a first-level degree plus extra years, but the qualifying point still matters. Work before the required degree can be valuable background. It can explain maturity, judgement and motivation. But it may not count toward the formal minimum in the way the candidate hopes.
That distinction feels harsh when someone was already doing serious work before graduation. Still, the application should not rely on HR making a generous reconstruction. Dates, degree levels and employment periods need to be clear enough for the formal count.
Why some years count only partly
There is another awkward detail: experience may be counted as partly relevant.
In practice, HR may look at a job and decide that it is partly on point. A year may effectively become half a year of relevant experience. In more distant cases, it may become a quarter. Nobody puts this in the vacancy notice in those words, but the logic appears in screening discussions often enough for candidates to care.
Suppose a role asks for programme management in climate adaptation. A year managing a climate adaptation project may count cleanly. A year managing a broader environment programme may count, but perhaps not fully. A year in general project administration with occasional climate tasks may be treated as only partly relevant.
The same can happen with policy roles, operations roles, partnerships roles and technical posts. The closer the work is to the vacancy's real centre of gravity, the safer the year is.
Here, hiring offices and HR can disagree.
The hiring office may look at a candidate and say: this person has exactly the kind of judgement we need. HR may reply: the minimum years are not demonstrated. The hiring office may argue that the experience is relevant enough. HR may say only part of it counts. The conversation can become quite lively, in the restrained institutional way in which people write polite emails while strongly disagreeing.
The candidate is not in that room.
Your job is to make the argument easier for the person who might want to defend you.
If your experience is adjacent, explain the bridge. If your title was vague, describe the real function. If your employer is not known in the UN world, make the scale and stakeholders clear. If a role was half technical and half administrative, separate the parts so the relevant half is visible.
Do not make the hiring office dig for your best evidence with a teaspoon.
Level matters too
Relevant experience is also often read as experience at a comparable level.
For many Professional posts, HR may look for work performed at a similar level, or at most one level below. A candidate applying for a P-4 role may need to show experience that looks like P-3 or P-4 responsibility, not simply many years in the same topic. A candidate applying for a management role needs evidence of management, not only participation.
"Progressively responsible" is not decorative wording. It asks whether the work became larger, harder, more independent, more political, more technical, or more managerial over time.
The same subject matter at the wrong level may not solve the problem.
You may have worked on procurement for years. Were you processing purchase orders, managing procurement planning, advising on rules, handling complex tenders, or leading a procurement unit? Those are not the same thing. You may have supported programme reporting for years. Were you formatting reports, consolidating inputs, negotiating indicators with donors, managing results frameworks, or defending performance data to a board?
The closer your level of responsibility is to the post, the easier your relevance is to defend.
The G-to-P trap
This level question is especially painful for current UN General Service staff.
General Service work can be serious, skilled and essential. Anyone who has worked inside an organisation knows that many offices would collapse quickly without strong GS colleagues. The problem is not the value of the work. The problem is how the system often categorises it.
When GS staff apply for Professional posts, their experience may be treated as not performed at a professional level. Even if the person knows the organisation, supports the work directly, understands the procedures and has years of internal exposure, HR may not count those years as P-level professional experience.
There are G-to-P pathways, examinations, rules and agency-specific programmes. Some recognise G5+ experience as relevant for P2 and P3 posts, or in other particular ways. That recognition is limited and uneven. It does not turn every year in a GS post into fully counted Professional experience for every P vacancy.
People who may already be competitive for P roles should therefore be very careful before accepting a GS post as a supposed easy entry into the UN.
Sometimes it is the right decision. A GS role can provide good income, access, knowledge, networks and a real career. For many people, it is a good job on its own terms.
But if your goal is a Professional-track international career, the GS title can become a trap. Despite years of effort by agencies, managers and staff associations to improve mobility, the category line still matters. A person can become known internally, useful to everyone, and still struggle to have the experience recognised as Professional experience when competing for P posts.
That is uncomfortable advice, but it is better to hear it before signing the contract than five years later.
Why UN experience is easy to recognise
Prior UN, IGO or similar international organisation experience is often easier for recruiters to read.
It comes with familiar structures: mandates, donor agreements, intergovernmental processes, field operations, procurement rules, results frameworks, staff categories, grades, panels, country offices, headquarters, resident coordinator systems, governing bodies and all the other furniture of international bureaucracy.
If you have already worked in that world, your experience needs less translation.
Regional cooperation organisations can also matter. They are sometimes easier to enter than the larger intergovernmental organisations, and they can produce useful evidence: working across countries, supporting member states, preparing policy papers, coordinating technical meetings, managing donor-funded regional projects, or translating national priorities into regional language.
Non-UN experience can be strong. It usually needs more explanation.
The UN reader may immediately understand what a programme officer in a UN country office probably did. They may not immediately understand what a project lead in a local foundation, a ministry unit, a university lab, a consulting firm or a bank actually handled.
That is where your application has to work harder.
How non-UN experience can still count
Non-UN experience becomes relevant when the application shows the connection clearly.
A government candidate may bring policy design, interministerial coordination, budget processes, regulatory work, negotiations, public administration or contact with international partners. Foreign office experience can be especially useful for diplomacy, representation, political judgement and multilateral language.
It is also a two-sided coin. Some hiring teams will value that background. Others may wonder whether the candidate is too political, too state-centric, too formal, or too far from delivery. The answer is not to hide the government experience but to show what is portable: coordination, evidence, negotiation, implementation, stakeholder management, drafting, crisis judgement, and the ability to work within institutional constraints.
NGO and humanitarian experience can translate strongly when it shows field delivery, community work, protection, logistics, cash programming, emergency coordination, monitoring or difficult operating environments. That is part of why a profile like Mamadou Barry's can become credible: the employer matters, and the operational proof behind it matters even more.
Private-sector and consulting experience can also count. Project delivery, budgets, client management, infrastructure, digital systems, risk, compliance, ESG, finance and data work can all be relevant if the vacancy needs those capabilities. The important thing is to translate the work into institutional evidence rather than corporate slogans.
Zayan's move from Dhaka to Bonn is one example of that translation. A bank job did not automatically become UN experience. But software delivery, environmental reporting, UNDP consultancy work and a clear technical bridge made the next step defensible.
Academia and research can count too, especially for technical, policy, evaluation, data, climate, economics, health, education or science roles. But publications alone may not be enough. The application should show whether the candidate has also worked with institutions, advised decision-makers, managed projects, communicated to non-specialists or turned analysis into usable policy.
The Volkov family story touches the academic version of the same problem. Sasha's academic and climate expertise needs to be read as more than knowledge. It has to plausibly travel into institutional decisions, evidence and policy.
Make the international parts visible
Many candidates have more international experience than their CV admits.
They worked with donor funding but wrote only "project manager." They used World Bank or EU rules but did not say so. They coordinated with ministries, NGOs, contractors and international advisers but listed only internal tasks. They reported against global indicators, applied international standards, supported cross-border work, wrote in English or French every day, or worked in multicultural teams, but left those facts buried.
If the experience is real, make it visible.
You are not pretending that a local job was a UN post. You are showing the parts of the job that help a UN reader understand why it may matter.
That is the line between honest translation and inflation.
"Managed events" is weak if the real work was organising regional policy consultations with government officials, donors and technical experts across four countries.
"Prepared reports" is weak if the real work was drafting results reports against a donor framework, consolidating field evidence and defending delays caused by procurement or security constraints.
"Worked on data" is weak if the real work was building a reporting system used by national counterparts to submit environmental indicators.
The relevant parts should not require detective work.
Help the hiring office defend your case
Sometimes a hiring office likes a candidate whose relevance is not obvious on paper.
That can happen with career changers, national experts, private-sector specialists, academics, regional organisation staff, government candidates, and strong internal GS colleagues trying to move into P roles.
If the hiring office wants you, they may need to argue that your experience should count. They may need to explain why an adjacent role was substantially relevant, why your level of responsibility was high enough, why your sector background is close enough, or why your unusual path is useful rather than risky.
Give them material.
Dates matter. Degree dates matter. Employer names matter. Duty stations matter. Reporting lines, budgets, staff supervised, countries covered, donors, counterpart institutions, technical outputs and decision-making responsibility all matter.
Vague claims are hard to defend. Concrete evidence gives people something to hold.
A useful application does not have to be huge. It has to make the relevant facts easy to find. If the vacancy asks for programme management, do not hide the programme size. If it asks for partnerships, name the kinds of partners. If it asks for policy advice, show who used the advice. If it asks for field experience, say where, with whom and under what constraints.
dotint.careers can help with that first comparison by checking your profile against vacancy requirements and surfacing places where relevance may be strong, weak or unclear. But no tool can rescue a profile that hides its own evidence.
When to apply anyway
This article should not make you afraid of every vacancy.
If you clearly lack a hard requirement, be careful. If the vacancy requires ten years after a qualifying degree and you have four, optimism will not add six years. If the role requires professional-level experience and all your evidence is at a support level, the risk is real. If you are in a GS post and trying to move to P, understand the category problem before assuming your internal years will count fully.
But do not self-discard too quickly either.
If you meet the formal requirements and your relevance is defensible, apply. If your experience is not an obvious match but you can make a serious argument from the function, sector, level, region, stakeholders or institutional context, apply. If the wording leaves room and you have real evidence, apply.
If you do not apply, your chance is exactly zero.
Spraying applications across every vacancy with a familiar noun in the title wastes time and teaches bad habits. Apply where there is a real case, then make that case clearly enough that a stranger can see it.
Relevant experience is not a magic label. It is an argument built from facts.
Make the facts easy to count. Make the level easy to understand. Make the international parts visible. Make the connection to the vacancy explicit.
And if someone inside the organisation wants to fight for your application, give them something better than "trust me, it was relevant."