When I entered a university of education in Korea, the expected path was clear. Graduate with a degree in elementary education. Take the national teacher recruitment examination. Become a public-school teacher.
I completed my teaching practicums, earned a Level 2 Elementary School Teacher Certificate, and graduated with a Bachelor of Elementary Education.
Then, one month after graduation, I joined the Global Green Growth Institute (International Organization). Today, I work on projects related to climate action, international development, carbon markets, and portfolio management across Asia.
To many people, the transition looks sudden. But actually, It was not.
I did not abandon education
During university, I became increasingly interested in questions that extended beyond the classroom.
How can education respond to climate change?
Why do people struggle to turn environmental awareness into action?
How are social and environmental programmes designed, implemented, and evaluated?
These questions led me toward sustainability, youth engagement, and international cooperation.
My education degree did not become irrelevant. It gave me a foundation for understanding people, structuring complex information, designing programmes, and communicating ideas clearly.
The challenge was learning how to translate those skills into a different professional context.
I built experience before I had the right title
I did not wait until someone gave me an international development role.
I joined youth organizations, developed climate education programmes, coordinated environmental projects, worked with public data, and built tools to support programme delivery and decision-making. Some projects were small. Others reached thousands of participants or involved multiple institutions and stakeholders. Each experience taught me something different: how to design a programme, manage implementation, analyze data, communicate results, and turn an idea into something people could actually use.
At the time, these experiences felt disconnected. Education. Climate action. NGO operations. Data analysis. International development. Only later did I recognize the common thread.
I was consistently working with fragmented information, complex social problems, and multiple stakeholders—and trying to turn them into clearer structures, practical programmes, or decision-making tools.
That became my professional story.
Data became my second language
One major turning point was learning to work with data.
Many social and environmental projects have strong intentions but weak evidence. Information exists, yet it is often scattered across reports, spreadsheets, institutions, and platforms.
I began using Power BI, Python, and geospatial data not because I wanted to become a pure data analyst, but because I wanted to make complex problems easier to understand.
Data helped me answer more practical questions.
Where is support most needed?
Which indicators show the problem?
What should a project prioritize?
How can decision-makers use the findings?
This combination of programme experience and analytical thinking later became highly relevant to international development work.
I stopped treating my background as a weakness
For a long time, I focused on what I lacked.
I did not major in international relations, economics, or environmental engineering. I did not have an overseas degree. I did not follow the conventional route into an international organization. But career transitions are rarely about becoming qualified in every possible way.
They are about showing how your existing experience can solve a new organization’s problems—and demonstrating that you are actively building the knowledge you still lack.
I began presenting my background differently.
Education became programme and capacity-building experience.
Coordinating schools, instructors, and organizations became stakeholder and operational management.
Developing educational materials became knowledge-product development.
Running climate initiatives became project design, implementation, and results reporting.
The short version
I did not move from elementary education to an international organization through one perfect internship, one qualification, or one carefully designed plan.
I followed the problems that interested me.
I turned those interests into projects.
I built practical skills through implementation.
I learned to use data.
And eventually, I found the language that connected my experiences into one coherent direction. My path was not linear, but it was never as disconnected as it first appeared.
The detailed stories—about the projects I built, my transition across different professional roles, and how I am preparing for graduate study—will be shared in separate articles.
