Collaboration: UN Envoy on Youth

In January 2018 the UN Envoy on Youth, Jayathma Wickramanayake, hosted a global and virtual joint workshop with Young UN. The workshop served to discuss key findings of Young UN’s Global Ideas Survey and to come up with proposals for making the UN system an employer of choice for young talent in terms of recruitment, career development and retention. As a result, five key priorities for HR reform were identified:

  • More career development support;
  • Cross-UN talent-management approach;
  • Longer and more secure contracts;
  • Better middle management;
  • Better collaboration within the UN system.

Since then, several proposals were submitted by the Young UN network to address these key priorities. A common thread throughout all of them was a need for more system-wide interagency collaboration, coherence and information sharing in order to better meet the SDGs and the complex needs of the 21st century.