World Trade Organization (WTO) - 2025 Young Professional Programme

The WTO Young Professionals Programme (YPP) is a unique opportunity for qualified young professionals up to the age of 32 years, as at 1 January 2026, from WTO Members with low or no professional representation in the WTO Secretariat, to enhance their knowledge of WTO and skills in international trade issues.  The Programme aims to widen the pool of professionals from these WTO Members, with the ultimate goal of broadening their representation in the WTO and/or other regional and international organizations.

General Functions

The selected Young Professional will be placed in a specific Division of the WTO Secretariat in accordance with the needs and priorities of the Organization; and based on the identified areas of interest of the Young Professional. Each Young Professional may express interest in not more than three areas of WTO work; and in order of preference.

The areas of work may include, inter alia, the following (in alphabetical order):

• Accessions
• Agriculture 
• Council and Trade Negotiations
• Dispute Settlement 
• Economic Research and Statistics 
• Government Procurement
• Intellectual Property Rights
• Market Access (tariffs and non-tariff barriers)
• Media and External Relations
• Sanitary and Phytosanitary measures
• Technical Barriers to Trade
• Trade and Development
• Trade and Environment
• Trade Facilitation
• Trade in Services and Investment
• Trade Policy Analysis
• Trade-Related Technical Assistance.
• Trade Remedies (anti-dumping and countervailing duties)

The WTO

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The goal is to ensure that trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely as possible.

Who we are

There are a number of ways of looking at the World Trade Organization. It is an organization for trade opening. It is a forum for governments to negotiate trade agreements. It is a place for them to settle trade disputes. It operates a system of trade rules. Essentially, the WTO is a place where member governments try to sort out the trade problems they face with each other.

The WTO was born out of negotiations, and everything the WTO does is the result of negotiations. The bulk of the WTO’s current work comes from the 1986–94 negotiations called the Uruguay Round and earlier negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO is currently the host to new negotiations, under the ‘Doha Development Agenda’ launched in 2001.

Where countries have faced trade barriers and wanted them lowered, the negotiations have helped to open markets for trade. But the WTO is not just about opening markets, and in some circumstances its rules support maintaining trade barriers — for example, to protect consumers or prevent the spread of disease.

At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations. These documents provide the legal ground rules for international commerce. They are essentially contracts, binding governments to keep their trade policies within agreed limits. Although negotiated and signed by governments, the goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business, while allowing governments to meet social and environmental objectives.

The system’s overriding purpose is to help trade flow as freely as possible — so long as there are no undesirable side effects — because this is important for economic development and well-being. That partly means removing obstacles. It also means ensuring that individuals, companies and governments know what the trade rules are around the world, and giving them the confidence that there will be no sudden changes of policy. In other words, the rules have to be ‘transparent’ and predictable.

Trade relations often involve conflicting interests. Agreements, including those painstakingly negotiated in the WTO system, often need interpreting. The most harmonious way to settle these differences is through some neutral procedure based on an agreed legal foundation. That is the purpose behind the dispute settlement process written into the WTO agreements.