Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. I agree this is an important topic with potential room for significant improvements.
FWIW, my impression is that I’ve benefited significantly from both courses and reading books (though of course it’s hard to attribute counterfactual impact), particularly on interpersonal skills, leadership, and self/time management.
One observation I find quite striking is that in previous communities and organizations I encountered such training opportunities significantly more often, and felt they were generally more appreciated, than in EA.
Specifically, during my university years I was involved in a student-run nonprofit, and this nonprofit—while naturally less ‘professional’ and less well run than the typical EA organization in various ways—spent significant resources on training and furthering the education of the student activists running it.
These efforts included two yearly events that included workshops (with both internal and external facilitators/instructors) for the org’s leadership and all org members/activists, respectively; a member of the executive board one of whose few key responsibilities it was to promote the professional development of activists; and a more fuzzy, cultural appreciation for such matters that led people to frequently sign up for external workshops, apply for grants or external mentorship schemes, etc.
Now, the actual mission of that organization was to promote higher education in post-conflict regions, and today for the broad purpose of improving lives in poor countries I’d donate to any GiveWell-recommended charity over that one in the blink of an eye. But for the purpose of improving my own skills, I think I’d seriously consider going back. In fact, I sadly think that in many ways that organization did a better job at promoting the professional development of its Europe-based student activists than at actually helping people in its target countries.
I was part of that organization for roughly as long as I’ve been into EA. At that org, I participated in countless workshops on things like time management, leadership styles, active listening, how to give and receive feedback, project management, impact assessment, risk management, preventing corruption, monitoring & evaluation, and many other things. They were hit-and-miss, and some were largely a waste of time in hindsight. But overall I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and am grateful for many opportunities to pick up and practice many skills I use every day in my current work in EA.
This changed dramatically when I started to work for EA organizations. With the exception of one CFAR workshop—which I found significantly less useful per unit of time—I don’t recall participating in any workshop or training opportunity that tapped into external expertise, and only 1-2 ‘internal’ ones. Nor do training opportunities get brought to my attention nearly as often.
(I’m also glossing over significant within-EA variance here. I’ve worked for two EA employers, and think that one had a culture significantly more conducive to staff development than the other even in the abscence of externally led workshops.)
One big caveat in this story is that the difference might be largely explained by experience/age. It is to be expected that, e.g., someone’s first workshop on project management is more useful than later training (diminishing returns). Perhaps EA employers are correctly perceiving that most employees—even if they’re recent graduates—have picked up the basics elsewhere, and that investing into further improvements is no longer worth it.
However, I’m skeptical that this is the full explanation. Overall, this aspect of my experience is one significant reason why I’m generally reluctant to enthusiastically recommend work “in EA” compared to work at institutions/orgs with an established track record of people learning/improving a lot there.
More broadly, my impression is that “professional development” or on-the-job training are explicit functions in most larger companies that have dedicated staff and resources. I haven’t seen this in EA, though perhaps this is simply explained by most EA orgs being relatively small.
Perhaps “learning by doing” is generally more effective than trying to improve skills via ‘free-floating’ workshops or other activities, and EA orgs are better at understanding this.
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.
Perhaps EA is culturally too arrogant, i.e. too indiscriminately convinced that it can do better than the rest of the world (which may in fact be true for, say, identifying high-impact donation targets—but this doesn’t necessarily generalize).
Perhaps there is a cultural difference I’m not aware of. (The student org I mentioned was German, EA’s culture is more influenced by the US/UK/international.)
Perhaps professional development is valuable as an organizational function primarily in contexts where staff aren’t intrinsically motivated to self-improve, and perhaps EAs tend to have that intrinsic motivation anyway.
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.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. I agree this is an important topic with potential room for significant improvements.
FWIW, my impression is that I’ve benefited significantly from both courses and reading books (though of course it’s hard to attribute counterfactual impact), particularly on interpersonal skills, leadership, and self/time management.
One observation I find quite striking is that in previous communities and organizations I encountered such training opportunities significantly more often, and felt they were generally more appreciated, than in EA.
Specifically, during my university years I was involved in a student-run nonprofit, and this nonprofit—while naturally less ‘professional’ and less well run than the typical EA organization in various ways—spent significant resources on training and furthering the education of the student activists running it.
These efforts included two yearly events that included workshops (with both internal and external facilitators/instructors) for the org’s leadership and all org members/activists, respectively; a member of the executive board one of whose few key responsibilities it was to promote the professional development of activists; and a more fuzzy, cultural appreciation for such matters that led people to frequently sign up for external workshops, apply for grants or external mentorship schemes, etc.
Now, the actual mission of that organization was to promote higher education in post-conflict regions, and today for the broad purpose of improving lives in poor countries I’d donate to any GiveWell-recommended charity over that one in the blink of an eye. But for the purpose of improving my own skills, I think I’d seriously consider going back. In fact, I sadly think that in many ways that organization did a better job at promoting the professional development of its Europe-based student activists than at actually helping people in its target countries.
I was part of that organization for roughly as long as I’ve been into EA. At that org, I participated in countless workshops on things like time management, leadership styles, active listening, how to give and receive feedback, project management, impact assessment, risk management, preventing corruption, monitoring & evaluation, and many other things. They were hit-and-miss, and some were largely a waste of time in hindsight. But overall I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and am grateful for many opportunities to pick up and practice many skills I use every day in my current work in EA.
This changed dramatically when I started to work for EA organizations. With the exception of one CFAR workshop—which I found significantly less useful per unit of time—I don’t recall participating in any workshop or training opportunity that tapped into external expertise, and only 1-2 ‘internal’ ones. Nor do training opportunities get brought to my attention nearly as often.
(I’m also glossing over significant within-EA variance here. I’ve worked for two EA employers, and think that one had a culture significantly more conducive to staff development than the other even in the abscence of externally led workshops.)
One big caveat in this story is that the difference might be largely explained by experience/age. It is to be expected that, e.g., someone’s first workshop on project management is more useful than later training (diminishing returns). Perhaps EA employers are correctly perceiving that most employees—even if they’re recent graduates—have picked up the basics elsewhere, and that investing into further improvements is no longer worth it.
However, I’m skeptical that this is the full explanation. Overall, this aspect of my experience is one significant reason why I’m generally reluctant to enthusiastically recommend work “in EA” compared to work at institutions/orgs with an established track record of people learning/improving a lot there.
More broadly, my impression is that “professional development” or on-the-job training are explicit functions in most larger companies that have dedicated staff and resources. I haven’t seen this in EA, though perhaps this is simply explained by most EA orgs being relatively small.
Some other hypotheses for what’s going on:
Perhaps “learning by doing” is generally more effective than trying to improve skills via ‘free-floating’ workshops or other activities, and EA orgs are better at understanding this.
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.
Perhaps EA is culturally too arrogant, i.e. too indiscriminately convinced that it can do better than the rest of the world (which may in fact be true for, say, identifying high-impact donation targets—but this doesn’t necessarily generalize).
Perhaps there is a cultural difference I’m not aware of. (The student org I mentioned was German, EA’s culture is more influenced by the US/UK/international.)
Perhaps professional development is valuable as an organizational function primarily in contexts where staff aren’t intrinsically motivated to self-improve, and perhaps EAs tend to have that intrinsic motivation anyway.
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.