After searching on the Forum I can’t find anything like this, and I’m aware that most of these jobs are government-issued and mostly kept private or sent by referrals, but I think that a page gathering all types of jobs to prevent nuclear risks related to war or energy would be useful to our EA members. A bit like this for AI safety: https://www.cold-takes.com/jobs-that-can-help-with-the-most-important-century/
Hi Vaipan,
You may want to check 80,000 Hours’ job board, selecting “nuclear security” as the area.
Yeah for sure, but I gave the example of the AI safety page because it would be great to have a sense of the kinds of the roles and competences in general instead of just having some of these roles depending on what is currently on the market. Well it is a confirmation that it might be an interesting project to do, since it doesn’t seem to exist!
There are also 80,000 Hours’ profiles on nuclear war and great power war, which talk about the roles and competences.
You’re mostly right, but with some caveats. The jobs are publicly listed because they need applicants, but those who work in those industries tend not to (at least directly) label themselves online for security reasons. They’ll have their job listed on their LinkedIn, but might be more cagey on forums etc. So they won’t exactly be posting ‘Come work with me at nuclear reactor xyz!’.
It may vary between industry and nation, but when I’ve worked in similar fields before most recruiting has been done by specialist recruiters, and by public posts on sites like Indeed. From memory 75% of the recruitment comes from those recruiters because the applicants tend to already have the right security clearances and vetting in place which significantly shortens the resources and time required to recruit them. The other 25% are fresh newbies like graduates who have to take the ‘long road’ but are preferred for more long-term hires. Many of these come from graduate schemes pitched to universities as well.
I imagine most qualified people for such roles will already have a network, and I should hope the clearances/vetting required, and so will be found by recruiters or be recommended roles anyway.
That said, there’s nothing to stop a list of public posts being made and updated once a week or so—though geographical restrictions might impact that a bit. It might be helpful for people to get a sense of how many roles are around, what is required, and so on.
The graduate scheme is a good idea, might be worthy to look into who presents there and ask them. I was thinking mostly about newbies but also mid-career professionals who might want to switch fields and go there, since not all of these jobs require some specific technical knowledge that needs to be built through time. Yes it might be useful to have such a list, I might put some hours aside one day and try a draft!
That’s a good idea, I’d be interested in seeing that. It may also be worth reaching out to organisations who deal with this kind of stuff to express interest in if they have any recruitment planned. Most won’t respond but you might make some useful points of contact from any who do? Lots of these places have a recruitment and onboarding team you can usually find buried in the website somewhere.
Absolutely, and of course get feedback from these orgs once the draft isn’t a draft anymore. Amateurism in EA when it comes to nuclear risks have been denounced more than once, so will try to steer clear of that!