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Guidelines

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Here at CANADEM, we are always striving to increase the marketability and appeal of our registrants. As part of this effort, we have introduced two major changes to our on-line registrant portal: You can now update your own professional summary and elections profile. Please take a few minutes to read through these guidelines as they contain important information on style, structure, and content.
Writing Professional Summaries

Guidelines for Writing Professional Summaries

A Professional Summary is a short paragraph that provides a snapshot of your work experience. We use them to help our clients get a quick overview of the registrants whose applications we forward. We also search within them for keywords when we do candidate searches. Since they might be the only thing that recruiters read, it’s important that they are succinct but detailed enough to express all the important information about your work history. Generally, they should be written with these rules in mind:

  • Between 80 – 150 words
  • Written in an elliptical style (i.e. like a newspaper headlines)
  • Written in the “third” person (i.e. don’t use “I”)
  • Use abbreviations wherever possible (i.e. always use 12 instead of ‘twelve’, BA instead of Bachelor of Arts)
  • Academic credentials are always contained within brackets
  • Semi-colons are used to separate work experiences
  • Sentence fragments are permitted to increase brevity as long as they don’t undermine general coherence and readability
Every professional summary should contain the following components in this order
  • An occupational title or titles (i.e. lawyer, police officer, policy adviser etc.)
  • Academic credentials (i.e. MA International Affairs, BA)
  • Current experience
  • International experience
  • Domestic experience
  • Important miscellaneous information (i.e. electoral observation missions, unique volunteer work, etc.)
Here are some examples

Civil engineer (MSc Engineering, BSc) with extensive international experience, especially in Africa; has worked as consultant for the last ten years advising on the construction of water and sanitation infrastructure to governments, NGOs, and firms (Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Sierra Leone, in Honduras, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa); previously held progressively responsible positions with private construction company in Britain (1985-2000).

Governance Expert (LLM Humanitarian Law, LLB, BA) with 30 years of experience in the areas of parliamentary reform, election technical assistance, and evaluation; career highlights include: team leader for an evaluation mission regarding the assistance provided by the Association of Canadian Parliamentarians the government of Uganda (2001); designed and delivered courses on political party development for Afghan public officials (2003); played lead role in organizing first Afghan elections, including establishment of polling stations and information campaign.

International Development Expert (Ph. D. Anthropology, MA Political Economy, BA) with rich theoretical understanding of gender and development; has consulted extensively in Venezuela and Pakistan where she conducted research on gender, identity, and development issues for IGOs (OCHA), high-profile NGOs (Oxfam, GOAL), private firms, and doctoral studies (2005-2010); has been with Brookings Institute since 2001 in progressively responsible positions: currently Senior Program Specialist overseeing projects for Middle East and South Asia, previously Team Leader for Peacebuilding in Reconstruction Program, and Senior Gender Specialist; has done gender and security training for American Refugee Committee and was adjunct professor of development studies at Johns Hopkins University (1999-2002).

Writing Electoral Profiles

Guidelines for Writing Electoral Profiles

To facilitate the recruitment and selection of election observers, we use electoral profiles. Electoral profiles provide a brief overview of your work in international or domestic elections (i.e. as an election observer, polling clerk etc.). If you don’t have any elections experience, please leave this field blank.

Every Electoral Profile should contain the following information in this order​
  • Position
  • Country
  • Organization
  • Year (yyyy)

​

They should be written with these rules in mind
​​
  • Use a forward slash (“/”) to separate position, country, organization, and year.
  • Use semi-colons (“;”) to separate experience
  • Use abbreviations wherever possible, especially long-term observer (LTO) and short-term observer (STO)
  • Experience should be listed in reverse chronological order, from most recent to least recent
  • Include any other relevant elections related experience at the end, especially administration, supervision, logistics, technical assistance, training of local electoral staff, civic education, and any specialized elections training.

​

Here are some examples of completed electoral profiles:

 

Profile Set 1

  • STO / Ukraine / Ukrainian Canadian Congress / 2004
  • LTO / Burundi / EU / 2003
  • STO / Tajikistan / CANADEM / 2003
  • Returning Officer / Canada / 2000
  • Elections Ontario / 1999

Profile Set 2

  • LTO / Georgia / OSCE / 2003
  • STO / Guyana / Carter Center / 2001
  • STO / Cambodia / UNDP / 1993
  • Senior Advisor / Paraguay / IFES / 1999

Profile Set 3

  • Civic Education Specialist / Mozambique / UNDP / 2001–2003
  • Electoral Advisor / Guinea / NDI / 1999
  • Voter Education Consultant / Kosovo / OSCE / 1996
  • Training on International Election Observation / Ottawa / IEMI / 2006

CANADEM

CANADEM is an international not-for-profit NGO dedicated to advancing international peace and security through the rostering, rapid mobilization, and mission.

Respect for the environment
An ever-increasing awareness that caring for the environment is the responsibility of us all, regardless of our area of expertise or profession, has propelled CANADEM to place more focus on our own global footprint as well as that of our sector. During this Period, we have embarked on a challenge to enhance our learning regarding the environment and how we interact with it – including efforts to create a baseline and targets for improving how we deal with our natural environment. We are therefore making a conscious and transparent effort to measure and manage the way we affect the natural world around us, hopefully becoming better caretakers along the way.
Impact Driven
CANADEM has always valued the positive impact we make in the world as a foundation of our work. It is this guiding principle that has led us to form lasting partnerships, in support of other entities, if we feel they can add greater value than we can at CANADEM. Searching for our comparative advantage, while avoiding falling into a simple race to find funding opportunities, is therefore essential to CANADEM. As we see an increasing number of individuals suffering from the consequences of conflict in the world, and prepare for even greater numbers of environmental disasters, the need to prioritise the areas where we can make a real difference and combine our efforts with like-minded entities, is vital to achieving success.
Efficiency
The objective of CANADEM’s leadership has always been to find the most innovative and cost-effective ways to contribute to communities in need, and not to place the growth of numbers and our budgets at the centre of our efforts. As a result, we have adopted a light footprint in terms of our human resources complement and infrastructure, making use of the latest technology, and empowering our small team to be as innovative and flexible in solving problems as our procedures allow. Our structures allow us to scale up and down as required, and for staff to work in different teams, according to the needs of the moment. Our 30 years of experience has taught us what our core capacities are and how to allocate precious resources.
Accountability & Transparency Values
From CANADEM’s earliest beginnings as a Government of Canada project, and during its rapid evolution into an independent NGO with its roots in international service, the principles of accountability and transparency have been a component of CANADEM’s DNA. Accountability for the use of public funds has been incorporated into procedures that needed to respond to the high standards of government. Transparency has been the vehicle to ensure the vital accountability that CANADEM maintains. CANADEM’s headquarters team is a well-trained group of committed individuals who believe in the important work they do – including the conviction that providing the best value possible to the communities and donors we serve is a primary component of our job. CANADEM’s rules and procedures are therefore established to ensure that every step of the way we are confident of our work, and can demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness.
People-Centered Values
Our work is about deploying people to help people. It is therefore of paramount importance to us that we are all relating to individuals in our chain of service delivery in a way that is respectful, understanding, considerate, and that brings out the best in us. Our internal working context is designed to foster humanity, fairness and support among our staff, which in turn aims to foster those same qualities among the experts we deploy. We have invested in a team of individuals (our Duty of Care Team), who provide a safety net for those experts we deploy. By taking care of our staff members and our deployed experts, we ensure that we have an effective flow of communication between all aspects of our operation. Our experienced and motivated staff feel supported, and are in turn able to support our experts in times of stress and prevent any potential problems from occurring.
Diversity & Inclusion Values
Ensuring an inclusive workplace that integrates diversity in terms of gender, language, culture, ethnicity and religion, is of prime importance for CANADEM both internally and with regards to our work with partners. We have made significant progress in attracting experts from 178 countries around the world – including from countries that are recipients of international assistance – so that a diversity of perspectives, understanding and expertise may be integrated into all operations that CANADEM supports. From our fair and transparent selection process, to our supportive Duty of Care Team (which ensures that individuals deployed have the resources they need to feel comfortable and confident in their work), we have invested significant energy in fostering diversity and inclusion within our roster system, in our election monitoring deployments, and in our own direct implementation of programming, at headquarters and in the field.
Partnership Values
The majority of our experts work within the assistance operations of our partners. Partnership is therefore of primary importance and value to us, and is key to the way we operate. Our many long-term relationships with other actors have been forged by promoting trust and understanding. The ability to work together with other actors, and not in competition, has allowed CANADEM to enhance the work of governments or organizations by injecting vital expertise, and targeting it where it is needed most. We believe that we can create a greater impact, when we work in partnership.