Considering leaving development? How to navigate this tough decision

Struggling to find a position that wouldn’t require so much travel, Lora Grozeva left the global development sector after 13 years and became a police officer. For Nate Rabe, who began his career with the UN Refugee Agency, or UNHCR, in 1988, it was a mix of wanting to spend more time with his family and a questioning of his place in the sector as “an elderly white man” that drove him to step away. They’re not alone. Every year, there are global development and aid development workers choose to transition away and there are a myriad of reasons driving that personal decision. “Most people, I would say, working in the sector, are stuck,” said Deborah Doane, who previously held roles with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Wildlife Fund and is the author of The INGO Problem. She explained what used to be quiet conversations behind closed doors about the inequity in the sector are now happening openly. “You often get middle managers saying I don’t know how to change it,” she said, adding that this is driving people away. “2024 and 2025 are, in particular, points of flux,” said Mahrukh Hasan, founder of the Fearless Project, an online education start-up working to advance leadership, innovation, and inclusion in the nonprofit workplace, explaining the context in which professionals might opt to transition out. “Right now, so many changes are occurring in terms of funding, approaches to aid and development, the burgeoning Shift the Power movement, and the community-led development movement,” she said. While all of those Devex spoke to emphasized that it is a personal decision with no right or wrong answer, what happens when those seeds of doubt about working in the development sector begin to creep in and the call for a change gets louder? Devex asked the experts. Take the time to check in As a first step, if a person is beginning to feel like they may want to seek out a new profession, they should check in with themselves, said social impact career coach and strategist Julia Firestone, and ask what they are feeling. “Are you experiencing burnout, trauma, or even PTSD?” she asked. Research shows that depression, anxiety, burnout, and post-traumatic stress disorder are common conditions among aid and development workers. As conflicts — such as that in Gaza, Ukraine, and Myanmar — increase in number and the devastating impacts of climate change continue to be witnessed, such conditions are unlikely to decrease and could contribute to making an individual consider exiting the sector in its entirety. While that is an option, taking some time off could help, advised Firestone, adding that a person could access mental health support. Many organizations, such as UNHCR, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Terre des Hommes, have dedicated teams to support their staff in this regard. That support is still “something you can ask for from your organization even if they haven’t explicitly offered before,” said Firestone. Choose fight or flight In research conducted by Nonprofit HR, some of the reasons listed for leaving their organizations included issues with compensation, lack of opportunity for professional development, and disengagement with the culture. The New York-based water NGO FLUSH found that WASH staff left because of problems with diversity and representation, limited professional development, limitations on pay, and little support for roles that can be emotionally and physically demanding. Some of these issues are present at the organizational level, and others at the sectoral level. Ask yourself whether you have the energy to push for organization- and system-level change and stay or whether you’d prefer not to, said Firestone. If you opt to stay, Firestone recommends finding peers who feel similar, can validate your experiences, and can help you challenge norms together, as it can be “overwhelming.” Hasan’s Shifting Power Accelerator is a space she recommended for finding connections. It’s an online course for those working in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors and involves group work that focuses on influencing change, community-led design, participatory grantmaking, and movement building. “Change really happens at all levels, not just leadership levels,” said Hasan. If leaving, Firestone advised researching to ensure the next working space you enter doesn’t have the same traits that may have pushed you out of the current one. Look at the leadership, advised Hasan, and examine whether an organization has already experienced a “reckoning” and issued statement commitments. “It’s up to the individual to observe and see ‘is the right organization for me?’ because there are organizations that exist that embrace these values more than others,” she said. Examine your skill set Should people choose to leave, development professionals have many transferable skills, said Doane. “The SDGs are global,” she said, meaning there is work within people’s locality they can engage with. It could be tackling water quality in the local river, supporting food bank management in the community, or advocating for local change. “If you’re a policy person, there’s loads you can do locally in your own country,” she said. Grozeva believes talking to people of all different backgrounds and witnessing extreme environments in her development sector roles set her up well for police work. “I worked in several missions in some areas that had had a civil conflict or were in the middle of war, and I’d interview people for bids that then turned out to be militants or terrorist groups in that country,” she said. “Now, when I come across people at work that may be involved in criminal activity, I’m not so shocked, scared, or outraged.” Rabe, who held multiple positions with the United Nations but recently stepped away after “feeling that the sector had lost its spirit,” is taking some time to consider his next step, but bus driving and doing some writing are both options. “[I have] a desire to do other things like write or pursue creative hobbies,” he said in an email. But the international development sector is large, and just because you might want to leave a part of it doesn’t mean you have to leave the social impact space as a whole, advised Anna Lerner Nesbitt, CEO at Climate Collective, a community of entrepreneurs, investors, nonprofits, and scientists leveraging digital technology for climate action. She worked with organizations such as GIZ and the World Bank as an economist before transitioning for a time to work with Facebook on energy poverty. “You can stay in impact, climate, or something similar because there are so many interdependencies today between some of these larger multinational organizations with nonprofits or multilateral development banks,” said Lerner Nesbitt. At a tech company, things move faster, and more opportunities come around, she said, and that differs from the bureaucracy and dependency on donors in development agencies, which may be a frustration. Such a change, access to professional development opportunities, and witnessing the impact differently could offer individuals a way of staying in the same work. Firestone said many of her clients are moving away from NGOs to philanthropy or corporate social impact, where they can still have an impact but be better financially compensated and offered growth opportunities.