It seems as if EA organisations were in need of more operations people around 2018 (as evidenced by that 80k article), is there currently a need for more operations people in EA orgs?
Relatedly, how difficult is it to get a position doing operations work for an EA org, especially if you have some but not tonnes of operations experience?
My personal impression is that it’s a bit easier to find operations staff than before, but still difficult.
We wrote this update at the top of the original article:
Note: Though we edited this article lightly in 2020, it was written in 2018 and is now somewhat out of date.
Due to this post and other efforts, people in the effective altruist community have become more interested in working in operations, and it has also come to seem easier to fill these roles with people not already active in the community. As a result, several recent hiring rounds for these roles were successful, and there are now fewer open positions, and when positions open up they’ve become more competitive.
This means that the need for more people to pursue this path is somewhat less than when we wrote the post. However, many of the major points in this post still apply to some degree, there is still a need for more people working in operations management, and we expect this need to persist as the community grows. For these reasons, we still think this is a promising path to consider. We also think the information on how to enter operations roles and how to assess your fit for them will still be valuable to people pursuing this path.
Regarding your first question, I think this is correct. I spoke to some EA operations folks at the 2019 EA Global and they said that the need for operations people has decreased. Seems like after the article came out, there was a large influx of people applying for different positions and those positions have been filled (for the most part). This isn’t to suggest that there aren’t any operations positions open anymore—I’m sure if you look at the 80k Job Board, you will find operations job opportunities.
Regarding your second question, I don’t have a good sense of how easy or difficult it is to get an operations position at an EA org these days. My general sense is that there are still quite a bit of qualified candidates applying to open operations positions so individuals who only have some but not a lot of operations experience may experience a disadvantage when applying to those positions. I can’t speak on behalf of any other EA org but at CHAI, we occasionally use contractors on a temporary basis to off-load some of our operations tasks. If you have some but not a lot of ton of experience (as you put it), I would suggest that you reach out to EA orgs that you are interested in and see if any of them are looking for any short-term / contractors.
+1 to Martin’s suggestion of reaching out to EA orgs and asking whether they need any short-term/contractor (or possibly volunteer) work doing.
Orgs will rarely run full hiring rounds for these, but my impression is that a fair amount of this kind of work exists. (Not saying that I think this strategy is anywhere near certain to work, but I would recommend it.) I never managed to make myself proactively ask people for roles like these, but the roles in this category that I got (which I think happened to me through chance really) mostly ended up being really useful for skill-building.
how difficult is it to get a position doing operations work for an EA org, especially if you have some but not tonnes of operations experience?
For a long time I would discourage people from going into operations unless I (or they) had reason to think they’re an especially good fit because I thought it was difficult to get in (mostly based on reading this post, and my assumption that operations roles have looser requirements than other roles, so more people tend to apply).
However, at recent EA conferences I’ve talked to a lot of people interested in operations, and over a six month time frame, I tend to find that almost all of them that continue to actively look for work in operations find it.
Like Martin and Amrit said, a lot of these positions go unadvertised. Of our current staff at RC, none of us formally applied for our roles. Two of us are former volunteers, one is a former contractor, and two are people our staff/former staff knew from working together at other organizations who were asked if they wanted to be on our team, without a formal hiring round. It’s not impossible to get a job by applying directly—in fact, if you have demonstrated interest in EA, I think you have a good chance at at least making it through the first round of applications—but you’ll likely have more luck by being proactive with a few organizations that you’re especially interested in working at.
+1. Like Marisa mentioned, some operations individuals get jobs without applying to jobs via the “traditional” route. I started off as a contractor and was promoted to a full-time employee.
is there currently a need for more operations people in EA orgs?
I’ve heard differing opinions on this from different organizations, and I think this is in large part because different organizations have different standards for operations hires.
For example, an organization that thinks that having an EA-aligned hire is important and is looking for someone with significant nonprofit/operations experience will have a more difficult time filling a role than an organization that’s just looking for someone with certain soft skills (e.g. problem solving, learning quickly, etc.). I think EA organizations tend to lean towards being more relaxed about their requirements, especially for junior roles, which is why it isn’t as hard for them to find operations hires.
That said, I think that having less strict hiring standards can lead to less-than-optimal hires, so even if there isn’t as much need per se for operations people, you can still have a big impact here if you’re an especially good fit. I’ve heard of some complaints about high turnover in operations roles (senior roles can be very stressful since you’re juggling quite a big, while junior roles can be boring since you’ll end up doing a good deal of admin work), so if you’re reasonably confident that you have the personality to stick with operations for a long time, you can have more impact by acquiring more skills and preventing your organization from having to do another costly hire a few years down the road. Similarly, people who have special skills (e.g. technical knowledge for automation, bookkeeping, HR, knack for organization, etc.) could have a higher counterfactual impact in an operations role.
So tl;dr, yeah, we probably technically don’t need more operations people, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have an impact working in operations.
Yeah it seems accurate that the need for operations folk is significantly less than in 2018. That said, I’ve seen plenty of operations job postings in the last year or so, and it looks like e.g. CEA and OpenPhil currently have roles on the 80k job board. Combining that with the fact that EA organisations seem to generally be growing, it seems like there’s still a need for more ops people in EA orgs overall. I guess the harder question is similar to your second one, namely whether such roles are currently easily filled with the in-EA people already aiming for them or with non-EA applicants, vs. whether there’d be a benefit to more EAs (with a particular amount or type of experience) doing so. I don’t have much of an answer to this, unfortunately.
One random thought on this is that different kinds of operations experience might can be important as well as different amounts of experience. I have the impression that EA orgs are getting large enough that operations roles can get fairly specialised in some places. For example, I’m not certain, but I think I’ve seen roles for people focussing on automation, for a Salesforce admin, for junior accounts people. I could imagine that for these roles, experience in the right specific thing might be an advantage, even if the experience isn’t that long. (Though I wouldn’t take that too strongly.) Something pointing in the other direction would be that, for more specific roles, value-alignment may be less important and so it may be easier to recruit from outside EA.
It seems as if EA organisations were in need of more operations people around 2018 (as evidenced by that 80k article), is there currently a need for more operations people in EA orgs?
Relatedly, how difficult is it to get a position doing operations work for an EA org, especially if you have some but not tonnes of operations experience?
My personal impression is that it’s a bit easier to find operations staff than before, but still difficult.
We wrote this update at the top of the original article:
Regarding your first question, I think this is correct. I spoke to some EA operations folks at the 2019 EA Global and they said that the need for operations people has decreased. Seems like after the article came out, there was a large influx of people applying for different positions and those positions have been filled (for the most part). This isn’t to suggest that there aren’t any operations positions open anymore—I’m sure if you look at the 80k Job Board, you will find operations job opportunities.
Regarding your second question, I don’t have a good sense of how easy or difficult it is to get an operations position at an EA org these days. My general sense is that there are still quite a bit of qualified candidates applying to open operations positions so individuals who only have some but not a lot of operations experience may experience a disadvantage when applying to those positions. I can’t speak on behalf of any other EA org but at CHAI, we occasionally use contractors on a temporary basis to off-load some of our operations tasks. If you have some but not a lot of ton of experience (as you put it), I would suggest that you reach out to EA orgs that you are interested in and see if any of them are looking for any short-term / contractors.
+1 to Martin’s suggestion of reaching out to EA orgs and asking whether they need any short-term/contractor (or possibly volunteer) work doing.
Orgs will rarely run full hiring rounds for these, but my impression is that a fair amount of this kind of work exists. (Not saying that I think this strategy is anywhere near certain to work, but I would recommend it.) I never managed to make myself proactively ask people for roles like these, but the roles in this category that I got (which I think happened to me through chance really) mostly ended up being really useful for skill-building.
Worth flagging that we at Rethink Priorities have had no trouble finding many well-qualified candidates when we do our operations hiring.
For a long time I would discourage people from going into operations unless I (or they) had reason to think they’re an especially good fit because I thought it was difficult to get in (mostly based on reading this post, and my assumption that operations roles have looser requirements than other roles, so more people tend to apply).
However, at recent EA conferences I’ve talked to a lot of people interested in operations, and over a six month time frame, I tend to find that almost all of them that continue to actively look for work in operations find it.
Like Martin and Amrit said, a lot of these positions go unadvertised. Of our current staff at RC, none of us formally applied for our roles. Two of us are former volunteers, one is a former contractor, and two are people our staff/former staff knew from working together at other organizations who were asked if they wanted to be on our team, without a formal hiring round. It’s not impossible to get a job by applying directly—in fact, if you have demonstrated interest in EA, I think you have a good chance at at least making it through the first round of applications—but you’ll likely have more luck by being proactive with a few organizations that you’re especially interested in working at.
+1. Like Marisa mentioned, some operations individuals get jobs without applying to jobs via the “traditional” route. I started off as a contractor and was promoted to a full-time employee.
I’ve heard differing opinions on this from different organizations, and I think this is in large part because different organizations have different standards for operations hires.
For example, an organization that thinks that having an EA-aligned hire is important and is looking for someone with significant nonprofit/operations experience will have a more difficult time filling a role than an organization that’s just looking for someone with certain soft skills (e.g. problem solving, learning quickly, etc.). I think EA organizations tend to lean towards being more relaxed about their requirements, especially for junior roles, which is why it isn’t as hard for them to find operations hires.
That said, I think that having less strict hiring standards can lead to less-than-optimal hires, so even if there isn’t as much need per se for operations people, you can still have a big impact here if you’re an especially good fit. I’ve heard of some complaints about high turnover in operations roles (senior roles can be very stressful since you’re juggling quite a big, while junior roles can be boring since you’ll end up doing a good deal of admin work), so if you’re reasonably confident that you have the personality to stick with operations for a long time, you can have more impact by acquiring more skills and preventing your organization from having to do another costly hire a few years down the road. Similarly, people who have special skills (e.g. technical knowledge for automation, bookkeeping, HR, knack for organization, etc.) could have a higher counterfactual impact in an operations role.
So tl;dr, yeah, we probably technically don’t need more operations people, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have an impact working in operations.
Yeah it seems accurate that the need for operations folk is significantly less than in 2018. That said, I’ve seen plenty of operations job postings in the last year or so, and it looks like e.g. CEA and OpenPhil currently have roles on the 80k job board. Combining that with the fact that EA organisations seem to generally be growing, it seems like there’s still a need for more ops people in EA orgs overall. I guess the harder question is similar to your second one, namely whether such roles are currently easily filled with the in-EA people already aiming for them or with non-EA applicants, vs. whether there’d be a benefit to more EAs (with a particular amount or type of experience) doing so. I don’t have much of an answer to this, unfortunately.
One random thought on this is that different kinds of operations experience might can be important as well as different amounts of experience. I have the impression that EA orgs are getting large enough that operations roles can get fairly specialised in some places. For example, I’m not certain, but I think I’ve seen roles for people focussing on automation, for a Salesforce admin, for junior accounts people. I could imagine that for these roles, experience in the right specific thing might be an advantage, even if the experience isn’t that long. (Though I wouldn’t take that too strongly.) Something pointing in the other direction would be that, for more specific roles, value-alignment may be less important and so it may be easier to recruit from outside EA.