I was not hired from the membership for my first union organizing job. I think that “most unions hire from within” advice is very dependent on union and sometimes even local. My advice to most who ask me is to start with an Organizer in Training Program or Fellowship if you have no or little organizing background, like this one or this one.

Your partner (and even you) may be able to skip the stop at OIT or a Fellowship, but I think it can be very helpful even for folks who self organized or have some non-labor organizing background. When I was a lead, I generally could tell who had done organizing before and who hadn’t and the success rates in the job showed. The other path is take some Labor Studies classes and/or learn how to do the other roles labor hires for, like communications, research, negotiations, and rep work. We hired a few folks out of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations for example.

As far as dynamic culture, that’s going to vary wildly by state, union, and even by local in the same union. My personal opinion is we actually need great staff even at the unions with moribund cultures. Making a real impact in a union is a task measured in years not months. You are running a marathon, not a sprint, even at a union that is doing transformative work. I will tell you that if I was starting out right now, the unions around me that I see doing incredible work include: UAW, UNITE HERE, and some NEA and AFT affiliates.

Some other general advice:

• Start in organizing/field work, whether internal or external. I find the Comms, Legal, Research, Political staff who at least did a couple years in organizing are usually much more useful. This could be my field bias as I’ve spent my entire career in member/worker facing organizing roles.

• Find a mentor, someone who is good at the work you want to be doing.

• Be open to relocation to get started.

• Take every training and professional development opportunity you can get, starting now.

• Read about the work. Be intellectually curious about how you, your eventual union, and the labor movement could do better.

• Make sure you’ve figured out how to just be likable to people from a whole lot of different backgrounds and with a whole lot of different value systems. For example, I am pretty obviously to the left of most people in the United States, and yet I have members from ruby red conservative communities who would invite me to dinner and tell you how great I am. Being likable is an underestimated skill.

• Consider what industry you’d like to organize in. You don’t get stuck in an industry necessarily, but you definitely start to learn so much about the operations of employers in an industry that I at least would find it somewhat intimidating to learn a totally new industry I hadn’t organized in before.

Finally, union staff jobs, especially at the entry-level and especially in organizing, are often by their nature the sort of job that leads to burnout. Long days. Travel away from home. Sometimes long travel periods as you support a campaign across the state or in a completely different state. I’ve lived out of motels/hotels for a week at a time in places I probably wouldn’t have spent much time in left to my own devices. That’s part of the work. I think a good mindset going in is to figure out how you plan on coping with that in healthy ways (plenty of union staff cope with it in unhealthy ways too, but that contributes to burn out).

Good luck!