I believe in harnessing technology to help give back to society.

I have lived most of my life in Bolivia, a developing country. The influence of international organizations was very strong there and I was very much aware of their presence. Even when just traveling around town, one would always pass by a billboard of a project financed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) or the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) or some European agency.

As a child in Bolivia, I remember a project to rebuild the public schools demolished in a landslide. My mother taught first graders at this school. It had a real impact on me: it was a project of hope for the teachers and little ones. I definitely wanted to be part of that “when I grow up” I thought.

I am member of the Information Management Unit in the Field Personnel Division (FPD) at the Department of Field Support (DFS). We are essentially the Personnel Section in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York.

This job has given me a glimpse of the very challenging Human Resources world at the United Nations. We are a small team supporting heavily used Human Resources systems for United Nations field missions.

Last year the United Nations received more the 120,000 applications for posts in their field missions across the globe. These are processed by my division, the Field Personnel Division. In coordination with the field, we staff over 28,000 posts in 34 missions.

My main day-to-day tasks are administering servers and databases for our Human Resource system which is called Nucleus. I am also participating in code redesign, giving user support in the use of Human Resource systems, running Human Resource statistics and participating in projects to prepare for the new Human Resource system, which is called Inspira.

On good days, I calmly perform project management tasks, attending meetings and going through project plans for integrating human resource applications. On not so good days, I will be frenetically running human resource statistics that encompass our field missions across the globe. At the same time I can also be attending to processes or databases or web pages that are not working as they should. Today, I am an active participant in projects to integrate current Human Resource systems and prepare for the new system, Inspira.

I joined the United Nations 10 years ago when I passed the National Competitive Examination in Information Technology. I left the private sector, where I was working for a major multinational IT corporation in Bolivia, that provided support to banks and communication companies in configuring their million-dollar servers. Throughout my career I have done application programming for banks, taught military audiences, maintained system configuration, programmed web sites, given user support and administered databases. Today, however, I am so very proud to work for the United Nations. I truly enjoy my work and I feel I am working for the greater good of mankind.

Since joining the United Nations, the world has opened up to me. I have been posted to Geneva, Beirut, The Hague on a brief assignment and New York. I have had the opportunity to interact with people of many different backgrounds, visit countries I only read about in stories and had a glimpse of international political and peace initiatives. The dynamics are so rich that everyday at the United Nations is interesting and challenging.

To quote my supervisor, as IT officers, we may not be in field missions physically rescuing survivors or directly influencing peace processes, but we are here helping through what we do best, managing and implementing human resource recruitment systems to put people on the ground there.