Thanks, this is all really useful to hear! It makes me think that it’s somewhat likely I’ve just generally not found the right courses / types of training.
I wonder if one thing that’s going on is that I’m making the enemy the perfect of the good. The courses I’ve done like the global health short course at Imperial felt interesting and fun to me, but not very efficient: I learned a bunch of things that I wouldn’t use alongside what I would, and the learning per unit time could have been higher. But on the other hand, it’s pretty likely that although I could have learned the most useful parts in a shorter time, I wouldn’t have, and so it was worth going.
I may also be biased by enjoying courses, and therefore feeling like they must be a selfish waste of time, rather than what I should do. Or perhaps by the finding of the courses seeming boring, and so not bothering.
Perhaps low staff retention rates make some EA orgs reluctant to invest into the development of their staff because they worry they won’t internalize the benefits.
This seems really sad if true, given that you would hope that in EA more than in the commercial world, skilling up staff to contribute elsewhere is still treated as valuable.
I’d love to hear any advice from how that charity decided which courses would be best for people to do! Also whether there are any specific ones you recommend (if any are applicable in the UK).
I’d love to hear any advice from how that charity decided which courses would be best for people to do! Also whether there are any specific ones you recommend (if any are applicable in the UK).
I’m afraid that I’m not aware of specific courses that are also offered in the UK.
I think that generally the charity actually didn’t do a great job at selecting the best courses among the available ones. However, my suspicion is that conditional on having selected an appropriate topic there often wasn’t actually that much variance between courses because most of the benefits come from some generic effect of “deliberately reflecting on and practicing X”, with it not being that important how exactly this was one. (Perhaps similar to psychotherapy.)
For courses where all participants were activists from that same charity, I suspect a significant source of benefits was also just collaborative problem solving, and sharing experiences and getting peer advice from others who had faced similar problems.
Another observation is that these courses often involved in-person conversations in small groups, were quite long in total (2 hours to 2 days), and significant use of physical media (e.g. people writing ideas on sheets of paper, and then these being pinned on a wall). By contrast, in my “EA experience” similar things have been done by people spending at most one hour writing in a joint Google doc. I personally find the “non-virtual” variant much more engaging, but I don’t know to what extent this is idiosyncratic.
Thanks, this is all really useful to hear! It makes me think that it’s somewhat likely I’ve just generally not found the right courses / types of training.
I wonder if one thing that’s going on is that I’m making the enemy the perfect of the good. The courses I’ve done like the global health short course at Imperial felt interesting and fun to me, but not very efficient: I learned a bunch of things that I wouldn’t use alongside what I would, and the learning per unit time could have been higher. But on the other hand, it’s pretty likely that although I could have learned the most useful parts in a shorter time, I wouldn’t have, and so it was worth going.
I may also be biased by enjoying courses, and therefore feeling like they must be a selfish waste of time, rather than what I should do. Or perhaps by the finding of the courses seeming boring, and so not bothering.
This seems really sad if true, given that you would hope that in EA more than in the commercial world, skilling up staff to contribute elsewhere is still treated as valuable.
I’d love to hear any advice from how that charity decided which courses would be best for people to do! Also whether there are any specific ones you recommend (if any are applicable in the UK).
I’m afraid that I’m not aware of specific courses that are also offered in the UK.
I think that generally the charity actually didn’t do a great job at selecting the best courses among the available ones. However, my suspicion is that conditional on having selected an appropriate topic there often wasn’t actually that much variance between courses because most of the benefits come from some generic effect of “deliberately reflecting on and practicing X”, with it not being that important how exactly this was one. (Perhaps similar to psychotherapy.)
For courses where all participants were activists from that same charity, I suspect a significant source of benefits was also just collaborative problem solving, and sharing experiences and getting peer advice from others who had faced similar problems.
Another observation is that these courses often involved in-person conversations in small groups, were quite long in total (2 hours to 2 days), and significant use of physical media (e.g. people writing ideas on sheets of paper, and then these being pinned on a wall). By contrast, in my “EA experience” similar things have been done by people spending at most one hour writing in a joint Google doc. I personally find the “non-virtual” variant much more engaging, but I don’t know to what extent this is idiosyncratic.