Very excited about this! I’d especially be interested in seeing career paths that could start making a significant difference in people’s lives this century, as that’s something 80k is moving away from—I’d be interested in advice about neglected areas within global health and climate change, for example.
The way I imagine this going wrong most easily is you getting overwhelmed with requests for career coaching in areas you don’t know very much about. I hope that you’ll set clear expectations about what you will/won’t be able to provide with your career coaching, how many people you’ll be able to coach, and how you’ll choose those people.
Thank you for writing what you’d find most valuable! This lines up well with my thoughts...
Regarding being overwhelmed by requests for advice: Yes! That’s definitely a failure mode. We’ve discussed how much we can give direct advice (very little in the near future, potentially more later but that’s quite a bit of work to get there) and how to choose candidates (where we have a lot of thoughts but, as with other things, we expect to decide on a criteria and then have to fix it once we see where it fails).
I’m cautiously optimistic that we just don’t have enough time to fall into this failure mode and so we’ll stop ourselves before this becomes an issue :-)
I can imagine you stopping yourself from doing too much coaching, but the people who apply for coaching don’t know what happened or why you didn’t get in touch. Does that make sense?
Something as simple as having an automatic reply to email enquiries saying “unfortunately we can’t respond to every request for coaching” could be helpful.
Yes, that makes perfect sense. I think we definitely need to have a system that (1) let’s people know if they’re not going to get coaching even though they asked and (2) doesn’t take up a lot of our time.
Very excited about this! I’d especially be interested in seeing career paths that could start making a significant difference in people’s lives this century, as that’s something 80k is moving away from—I’d be interested in advice about neglected areas within global health and climate change, for example.
The way I imagine this going wrong most easily is you getting overwhelmed with requests for career coaching in areas you don’t know very much about. I hope that you’ll set clear expectations about what you will/won’t be able to provide with your career coaching, how many people you’ll be able to coach, and how you’ll choose those people.
Thank you for writing what you’d find most valuable! This lines up well with my thoughts...
Regarding being overwhelmed by requests for advice:
Yes! That’s definitely a failure mode. We’ve discussed how much we can give direct advice (very little in the near future, potentially more later but that’s quite a bit of work to get there) and how to choose candidates (where we have a lot of thoughts but, as with other things, we expect to decide on a criteria and then have to fix it once we see where it fails).
I’m cautiously optimistic that we just don’t have enough time to fall into this failure mode and so we’ll stop ourselves before this becomes an issue :-)
I can imagine you stopping yourself from doing too much coaching, but the people who apply for coaching don’t know what happened or why you didn’t get in touch. Does that make sense?
Something as simple as having an automatic reply to email enquiries saying “unfortunately we can’t respond to every request for coaching” could be helpful.
Yes, that makes perfect sense. I think we definitely need to have a system that (1) let’s people know if they’re not going to get coaching even though they asked and (2) doesn’t take up a lot of our time.