Working for Tetra Tech: Insider tips on landing a job

BARCELONA — Whether you are a seasoned development professional or transitioning from another sector, tailoring your CV and demonstrating those all important soft skills is key to landing a job with Tetra Tech.

Maria Chaney, a staffing specialist with the organization, gave Devex some insights into how to make your application stand out. She discussed the importance of cover letters and shared tips for professionals looking to transition to development work or make a career move within the sector.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are the top skills Tetra Tech is looking for?

In technical skills, we're really looking at more gender and social inclusion skills, along with some skills lying in the private sector. We think this is going to be an integral part of our clients’ focus and projects within the next years.

USAID is one of our largest clients and their new digital strategy will be highly in-demand moving forward so we're looking for candidates with technological [and] IT skills that would be able to help encompass that and move it forward as it becomes a large portion of future USAID projects.

For the soft skills, I think the two most important ones are leadership [and] management capability and communication skills. Regarding leadership capability, we're looking at leaders that are able to manage multicultural teams and unify a project team to have a set of objectives and goals.

In terms of communication, we're not only looking at written and verbal communication skills but also listening — being able to listen to the team and listen to the client feedback and implement those changes correctly.

The other part of communication that we think is really integral is presentation ability, so being able to create a presentation that portrays ideas very clearly and is able to hold either an informative stance or a persuasive stance as the project needs allow.

Where are there opportunities at Tetra Tech for professionals from other sectors?

We are quite honestly always looking for professionals who have niche technical experience, such as a PFM — public finance management consultants. Those with that niche technical experience could look for roles that are more adviser or consultant related, perhaps they could help manage the beginning stages of capacity building within a project.

Those with cross-cutting experience, such as finance, monitoring, learning, and evaluation, or really any sort of administration roles are also highly in demand and are really core to a lot of the projects that we work on. Within those positions, we have both short-term and long-term positions on our current projects and our [bidding] proposals.

Would career transitioners be expected to apply to entry level jobs? And how can they make up for their lack of experience in the development sector?

Not necessarily, [it would] depend on the sector, the nature of the opportunity, and what experience a candidate already has.

We do place a high emphasis on really transferable skills in this respect, so learning ability, management ability, teamwork, time management, [and] those more soft skills that we talked about earlier.

For home office and field positions, skills in project administration or new business development are very highly regarded, so any opportunities that allow candidates to have that background experience of managing projects, even if they are within a different sector, are very valuable.

Additionally, niche technical experience is very highly regarded.

Where are the opportunities within Tetra Tech for senior professionals?

We have several opportunities for senior professionals and people that we regard as “key personnel,” as USAID typically phrases it.

These key personnel often need more than 10 years of experience. Candidates who have that lengthier experience also provide an advantage for our contracts in that they have more best practices and lessons learned from past experiences that they're able to relay over. So those senior level people are really integral within our organization structure.

How can these professionals ensure their application is not dismissed because they seem overqualified?

[My] greatest advice would be to really revise or tailor their CV directly to the position to highlight the most important, relevant experience, and use keywords that are used in the position description also within their CV.

[That way] we're able to see that they do have the experience that we are looking for and, as long as that aligns with the project, we are definitely interested in speaking with them. Another point is using the cover letter [to express] their motivation for the position.

For candidates who are worried about their lengthy CV, they could expand on the experiences that are most relevant to the position, in reverse chronological order, and perhaps for the other experiences they just leave it as [a few] lines but [don’t] dedicate paragraphs to them. It comes down to the candidate taking the time to revise their CV to every different position that they apply to.

What should candidates be demonstrating in their cover letter versus their CV?

We can see all the numbers in your CV — what we're looking for in the cover letter is more of the candidate sharing their story, their motivation for wanting to pursue this position, and sharing their personality. Cover letters also show the candidate’s writing ability and with the majority of our projects, having exceptional writing abilities is a very highly valued skill.

The other thing … is not just to use “I” statements and talk about what they’ve done, but also be able to relate that past experience [to how it is going] to add value to our projects and to our company, and how they fit in with our company culture.

We're looking for evidence that the candidate has done their research on our company and is very motivated to fully pursue this role.