Date · Wednesday, 6 May 2026, 10:30 to 11:30 CEST
Hosted by · UNHCR and ITU
Session page · UNOG learning
Speakers
- Betty Almonte · Talent Management and Performance Officer, UNHCR (Budapest), session host · Bio
- Alexandra Marinoiu · Head of Learning & Development, ITU, session co-host · Bio
- Naria K. Santa Lucia · General Manager, Microsoft Elevate · Bio
- Mirek Pospisil · Head of Public Policy and Macro-Economic Research for France, LinkedIn · Bio
- Rathan Kinhal · Senior Manager, EY Switzerland · Bio
In a rapidly changing world, long-term career security comes from the skills you carry, not just the position you hold. Whether inside the UN or beyond, professionals with strong digital, analytical, and collaboration skills are more adaptable, competitive, and ready for new opportunities. This session will show you how to stay relevant and future ready.
Key takeaways
- Think in skills, not titles. Workers matched by skills qualify for 3x more roles than those matched by job title alone.
- By 2030, up to 70% of skills required for any given role could change. Continuous learning is structural, not optional.
- The three fastest-growing skill categories in 2025: people skills (leadership, communication), AI implementation, and risk/compliance.
- Green skills are a hidden differentiator. professionals who list them are hired at a higher rate, even in roles that don’t explicitly require them.
- Human skills are not being displaced by AI; they are becoming more valuable alongside technical skills. The most marketable professionals bridge both.
- The UN’s recruitment systems still lag on skills-based hiring. Compensate through storytelling, frame duties as impact, and map your experience to the language of the job description.
- Do a skills self-audit regularly: what to protect, what to evolve, what to let go.
Mirek Pospisil
Mirek’s contribution is data-backed and immediately applicable to how you think about your career. The core shift he’s asking for: stop organising your career around job titles and start organising it around skills. LinkedIn’s data shows that professionals matched by skills qualify for over three times as many roles as those matched by title, meaning the way most people approach the job market is artificially limiting their options. The practical implication is to audit and explicitly list your skills, especially on LinkedIn, because recruiters are increasingly using that signal over job history.
He also gives you a concrete sense of which skills to prioritise right now. The three fastest-growing clusters in 2025 are people skills (leadership, communication, collaboration), AI implementation (not just basic literacy, real workflow integration, prompt engineering, AI strategy), and risk and compliance (less obvious but increasingly valued as regulation accelerates). A less expected one: green skills. LinkedIn data confirms that professionals who list green skills are hired faster, even for roles that don’t explicitly require them. If you have any exposure to sustainability, environmental policy, or related areas, list them.
The urgency behind all of this: by 2030, up to 70% of skills required for any given role could be different from today. The shelf life of any specific skill is shortening. The response isn’t to master one thing, but to build the habit of learning continuously, and to see your career as a rolling portfolio of skills rather than a ladder of titles.
Naria K. Santa Lucia
Naria’s most immediately useful contribution is a free resource: Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers, a programme specifically built for the UN system offering training on AI agents, prompt engineering, and responsible AI, delivered in partnership with EY and the UN System Staff College. There is also a Changemaker Fellowship cohort launching for UN staff. All of it is free. Register at aka.ms/AIforUNSystemStaff or unssc.org/ai-skills-for-un-personnel.
Beyond the resource, she makes a practical case for how to actually start with AI when you don’t have a technical background. She built her own AI agent by asking the AI itself what parameters and inputs to use, no coding, no prior knowledge. The agent now connects people in her network. Her point is that you don’t need to understand the technology to use it; you need to be willing to experiment. Start with something concrete in your own job: what do you do every day that AI could assist with? That question, applied to your specific context, is more useful than any generic AI course.
On the gender dimension: she flags something worth taking seriously. Men openly talk about using AI and vibe coding. Women, she observes, tend to downplay or omit their AI use, possibly out of concern it raises the question “then why are you here?” This is becoming a strategic disadvantage. If you built something with AI, if you used it to do your job better, say so. Explicitly. That visibility is part of how you establish yourself as capable in the current market.
Rathan Kinhal
Rathan’s most practical contribution is on storytelling. His argument: skills have a short shelf life, but a good storyteller can always move laterally. The way to signal this in a CV is not to list skills as attributes, but to show them in use: “Because of skill X, I was able to deliver Y in Z context.” That structure, skill, action, setting, is what makes an application credible and memorable. It also maps directly onto what competency-based interviews ask for.
He also offers a concrete self-audit practice: regularly go through your skills and ask what to protect, what to evolve, and what to let go. This is uncomfortable but, in his framing, the single most reliable thing you can do to stay ahead of transitions.
His growth mindset framework, Reframe, Adapt, Lead/Evolve/Act, is less a motivational concept and more a set of specific moves. Reframe means understanding that AI replaces tasks, not your judgment, ethics, or ability to lead, those remain yours. Adapt means stacking skills continuously, treating curiosity as your most durable asset. Lead/Evolve/Act means building learning rituals: a team session on a new skill, a retrospective on why something worked, using AI as a diagnostic tool rather than a decision-maker.
On peer learning: if you don’t know a skill, find the person in your organisation who is already a champion of it and ask for a few conversations. Don’t try to learn in isolation, the fastest path to credibility in a new area is usually through someone who is already there.
Alexandra Marinoiu
Alexandra’s contributions come mostly through moderated discussion and live Q&A, but several are directly useful. On the gap between skills-based hiring theory and UN recruitment reality: the systems are behind, but managers are still looking for skills, they just can’t ask for them explicitly through the existing job description format. The workaround is storytelling and demonstrated impact. Mirror the language of the job description in your application; build keywords from the vacancy announcement into your CV and cover letter so you pass the automated screening. Then make sure the story you tell around those keywords is genuine and impact-focused.
On certifications: Coursera qualifications are assessed positively by recruiters. On AI training access: LinkedIn Learning for AI fundamentals, Microsoft Enterprise Skills platform for Copilot, and the UNSSC link for broader free AI training for UN staff.
Frameworks and models
| Name | What it stands for | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Skills-First Approach | Viewing your career and the labour market through a skills lens rather than job titles | Audit your skills explicitly; match yourself to opportunities by skill overlap, not title match; showcase skills on LinkedIn rather than relying on job history alone. Skill stacking sits inside this page as the portfolio-build practice |
| Reframe, Adapt, Lead | Three growth-mindset moves: reframe what AI is doing to your role, adapt by stacking skills, lead by building learning rituals | Reframe: recognise AI replaces tasks, not your purpose or judgement. Adapt: stack skills continuously, treat curiosity as a durable competency. Lead: build learning rituals, run retrospectives, use AI as a diagnostic tool, not a decision-maker |
| Skills Self-Audit | Three-bucket review of your skills: Protect, Evolve, Let Go | Annually, sort each skill into one bucket. For Evolve, name the next-layer version; for Let Go, name what is replacing it. Pick at most three Evolve skills to invest in over the quarter |
| Skills-in-Use CV Pattern | Writing pattern for CV bullets and interview answers: “Because of skill X, I delivered Y in Z context” | Use whenever you write a CV bullet, cover-letter sentence, or competency-based interview answer. The three components (skill, outcome, context) must all be present |
Resources
| Resource | What it is / What it’s for | Link |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn Skills Signal Report 2025 | Annual LinkedIn research on fastest-growing skills and what drives hiring success | |
| LinkedIn Global Green Skills Report | Research on green skills adoption, definitions, and hiring rate data | |
| AI Skills for UN System Staff (UNSSC) | Free AI training for UN and international organization staff | unssc.org |
| Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers | Free AI capacity building programme for UN system, including a Changemaker Fellowship cohort developed with EY | aka.ms/AIforUNSystemStaff |
Last updated 2026-05-10.