Academy for Educational Development

Just because you’re graduating college doesn’t mean that you have to be done with educational development. Even if you haven’t studied education for a second, you must have picked up something with 17 years in the educational system. At the very least you’ve lived in a thriving society, and you understand how education, health, civil society and economic development are the keys to a better life. Maybe you take these things for granted, but once you see what the non-profit Academy for Educational Development is doing, you’ll get a better understanding for how innovative solutions can help solve critical social and economic problems. AED has programs that focus on 7 specific areas – Education, Enterprise & Economic Development, Environment & Energy, Health, HIV/AIDS, Leadership & Democracy, and Youth – and they also take 7 different approaches – Behavior Changes, Gender, Partnerships, Research & Evaluation, Social Marketing, Technology Applications, and Training. It may sound like they have their hands full, and they do. AED is running “more than 250 programs serving people in all 50 U.S. states and more than 150 countries.”

Join the Academy

Getting a feel for what exactly the Academy for Educational Development does is a little tough. It’s not that they don’t eloquently describe themselves, but it’s that they do so much. The best way to get a deeper feel for what the organization works on every day is to read their What We Do page and their Projects page. Like what you see? Why not consider working at AED.

The Academy for Educational Development has an interesting way of organizing their jobs – they do it by pay grade. The grades range from 3 to 10, and we think that you should look most closely at Grades 4 and 5 even though the experience requirements appear to be a bit beyond what most new college grads have. This seems a bit weird at first, but it actually makes browsing their jobs really easy. All you have to do is go to their Current Openings and then check out each grade. Grade 3 is typically Administrative jobs, and they don’t have any right now. Grade 4 has one job, which is Senior Program Assistant – The Open World Program Center for International Exchanges. Grade 5 has 8 jobs – Senior Program Associate, AED Center for Global Health & Communication Marketing; Accounting Associate, AED Accounting Department; Executive Assistant, AED Center for Gender Equity; Program Associate, AED Center for Academic Partnerships; Program Associate, AED Center for Health Communication; Senior Program Associate, Web Portal, AED Information Technology Applications Center; Senior New Media and eMarketing Associate, AED Center for Health Communication; and Technical Support Analyst, AED Information Technology Department. Yes, a lot of these jobs have “Senior” in the title, but the job descriptions look pretty close to entry level. We think that it would be well worth your while to apply for most of these jobs if they interest you, and you can do that by sending a cover letter and resume to employ@smtp.aed.org with the position # (it’s in the job posting) somewhere in the e-mail. Although they don’t make it clear in the job postings, we think that all of these jobs are at AED’s headquarters in Washington, DC.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• AED.org
• Jobs with the Academy for Educational Development
• About the Academy for Educational Development
• AED’s Projects
• AED News
• AED Success Stories
• AED’s Fact Sheet
• AED’s History
• AED’s Leadership Team

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