The case for limiting scope to certain cause areas, fields and/or locations
> What cause areas and career paths do we want to focus on? Do we want to start with specific fields and slowly grow, or do we want to provide shallow introductions more broadly and slowly deepen our content? (from your open questions)
I have supported some 30 people with their career planning, and in my experience, good career advice is both really valuable and quite difficult to give. High impact career paths are complex, difficult to evaluate and change often. If you try to cover all cause areas globally, you might not be able to give good advice, so I would argue for narrowing down the scope now already.
For instance, 80,000 Hours has narrowed its scope to its “priority cause areas” (longtermist causes) and effectively also to jobs in the UK & the US, partly as some of the best opportunities might be in those countries and partly because they know these countries best. Also, they partner with experts in the various cause areas to ensure accurate content.
Possible ways to narrow scope: - location: focus on general career coaching for people in Israel who are not yet set on a certain cause area - cause area (such as Animal Advocacy Careers) - field (e.g. careers in politics & policy such as HIPE)
I’d also consider what fields you know well personally.
If you receive good feedback on that and have the capacity, you could still expand to more cause areas and locations, but it seems easier to grow this way around rather than start broadly and then narrow down.
Generally, I do think that good career advice is one of the main bottlenecks of the EA community (and probably also altruistic people in general), and I’m excited to see what might come from this!
Hi Manuel, thanks for this comment. I think I agree with all your considerations listed here. I want to share some thoughts about this, but as you’ve mentioned—this is one of our open questions and so I don’t feel confident about either direction here.
First, we have indeed been giving general career coaching for people in Israel for several years now, so in a sense we are implementing your recommended path and are now moving onto the next phase of that plan. That being said, there still remain reasons to continue to narrow our scope even at this stage.
Second, you mention partnering with experts in the various cause areas to ensure accurate content—I completely agree with this, and wouldn’t dream of providing concrete career advice independently in fields I don’t have experience in. In the content we are writing right now we require interviewing at least 7 experts in the field to provide high-confidence advice, and at least 3 experts in the field even for articles we mark as low confidence (of which we warn people to be careful about). So it’s really important to me to clarify that none of the concrete career-specific advice we provide will be based exclusively on our own opinions or knowledge—even within the fields we do have experience in.
Finally, I think at least some of the issues you’ve (justifiably) raised are mitigated by the way we aim to provide this advice. As opposed to existing materials, which more confidently aim to provide answers to career-related questions, we have a larger emphasis on providing the tools for making that decision depending on your context. As community organizers, one of the things that pushed us to start this effort is the feeling that many people, who don’t happen to be from the (very few) countries that EA orgs focus on, have very little guidance and resources, while more and more is invested in optimizing the careers of those within those countries. We believe that doing highly focused work on Israel would not serve the community as well as providing guidance on what needs to be explored and figured out to apply EA career advice to your own context. As such, we want to provide recommendations on how to check for opportunities within the scope that’s relevant to you (e.g. country or skillset), rather than aiming to provide all the answers as final conclusions on our website. This applies most to our career guide, but also to specific career path profiles—where we want to first provide the main considerations one should look into, so that we provide valuable preliminary guidance for a wide range of people, rather than end-to-end analysis for fewer people.
The mitigations described above can be much better evaluated once we have some materials online, which will allow others to judge their implementation (and not only our aspirations). We plan on soliciting feedback from the community before we begin advocating for them in any meaningful way—hopefully that will help make these responses less abstract and still leave us time to collect feedback, consider it and try to optimize our scope and messaging.
The case for limiting scope to certain cause areas, fields and/or locations
> What cause areas and career paths do we want to focus on? Do we want to start with specific fields and slowly grow, or do we want to provide shallow introductions more broadly and slowly deepen our content? (from your open questions)
I have supported some 30 people with their career planning, and in my experience, good career advice is both really valuable and quite difficult to give. High impact career paths are complex, difficult to evaluate and change often. If you try to cover all cause areas globally, you might not be able to give good advice, so I would argue for narrowing down the scope now already.
For instance, 80,000 Hours has narrowed its scope to its “priority cause areas” (longtermist causes) and effectively also to jobs in the UK & the US, partly as some of the best opportunities might be in those countries and partly because they know these countries best. Also, they partner with experts in the various cause areas to ensure accurate content.
Possible ways to narrow scope:
- location: focus on general career coaching for people in Israel who are not yet set on a certain cause area
- cause area (such as Animal Advocacy Careers)
- field (e.g. careers in politics & policy such as HIPE)
I’d also consider what fields you know well personally.
If you receive good feedback on that and have the capacity, you could still expand to more cause areas and locations, but it seems easier to grow this way around rather than start broadly and then narrow down.
Generally, I do think that good career advice is one of the main bottlenecks of the EA community (and probably also altruistic people in general), and I’m excited to see what might come from this!
Hi Manuel, thanks for this comment. I think I agree with all your considerations listed here. I want to share some thoughts about this, but as you’ve mentioned—this is one of our open questions and so I don’t feel confident about either direction here.
First, we have indeed been giving general career coaching for people in Israel for several years now, so in a sense we are implementing your recommended path and are now moving onto the next phase of that plan. That being said, there still remain reasons to continue to narrow our scope even at this stage.
Second, you mention partnering with experts in the various cause areas to ensure accurate content—I completely agree with this, and wouldn’t dream of providing concrete career advice independently in fields I don’t have experience in. In the content we are writing right now we require interviewing at least 7 experts in the field to provide high-confidence advice, and at least 3 experts in the field even for articles we mark as low confidence (of which we warn people to be careful about). So it’s really important to me to clarify that none of the concrete career-specific advice we provide will be based exclusively on our own opinions or knowledge—even within the fields we do have experience in.
Finally, I think at least some of the issues you’ve (justifiably) raised are mitigated by the way we aim to provide this advice. As opposed to existing materials, which more confidently aim to provide answers to career-related questions, we have a larger emphasis on providing the tools for making that decision depending on your context. As community organizers, one of the things that pushed us to start this effort is the feeling that many people, who don’t happen to be from the (very few) countries that EA orgs focus on, have very little guidance and resources, while more and more is invested in optimizing the careers of those within those countries. We believe that doing highly focused work on Israel would not serve the community as well as providing guidance on what needs to be explored and figured out to apply EA career advice to your own context. As such, we want to provide recommendations on how to check for opportunities within the scope that’s relevant to you (e.g. country or skillset), rather than aiming to provide all the answers as final conclusions on our website. This applies most to our career guide, but also to specific career path profiles—where we want to first provide the main considerations one should look into, so that we provide valuable preliminary guidance for a wide range of people, rather than end-to-end analysis for fewer people.
The mitigations described above can be much better evaluated once we have some materials online, which will allow others to judge their implementation (and not only our aspirations). We plan on soliciting feedback from the community before we begin advocating for them in any meaningful way—hopefully that will help make these responses less abstract and still leave us time to collect feedback, consider it and try to optimize our scope and messaging.