Pros
- Great vision: make the Bible available to people in every language, while also empowering minority language groups to preserve and develop their language. - Amazing opportunities to travel. - Opportunities to experience and even immerse yourself in different cultures. - Meet and work with people from all over the world who share a passion and dedication for Bible translation, linguistics, and working on behalf of minority language groups. - Develop relationships and make friends that could last the rest of your life. - A chance to "be all you can be". If you can push past naysayers and local corporate culture resistant to change, you can bring your whole being to bear on SIL's work. In 5 years on the field, I've done linguistics, dictionary development, grant-writing, software development, language program management, construction, translation project design, exegesis, software training, and media production, to name a few roles.
Cons
- The need to raise your own salary by sharing the vision with friends, family, and churches (a little like GoFundMe or Kickstarter) has you always being a PR/Fundraiser person, in addition to your primary role. This can become especially difficult with growing family size, changing locations to a more expensive country, and when existing funders decide to stop while you are overseas. - Every work location worldwide will have its own corporate culture, its own team issues, and its own challenges. The area I was in was inadequately staffed, had leadership that was probably inadequately trained, and unfortunately a lot of infighting and territorialism, despite the small group. - Philosophy paralysis: SIL has taken on so many philosophies of "the right way to do things" that work grinds to a halt while people wait for all the perfect conditions. Again this probably varies by region. - Expensive health insurance. - Too much "reinvention" of ways of doing things. SIL has been "reinventing" itself the whole time I've worked here. The constant churn of ideas, strategy, and direction makes it hard to know what is really going on. - It's also difficult to get a feel for what SIL is and really stands for when there is so much regional influence on how work is done, on processes, on corporate culture.