Thanks so much for doing this, your answers are really informative. :)
Here’s a bunch of questions, all of them tied together, so feel no obligation to answer all (or any) of them.
Which individual parts of advising do you think are the most and least valuable? You listed these components above, which are most critical?
discussing cause prioritisation, suggesting career options the person hadn’t yet considered, helping rank options, providing encouragement to apply for things where the person might be too diffident, making introductions, giving more information / context on specific roles or organisations, recommending particular resources, brainstorming a concrete plan / next steps.
Can you say more about the relative value with advising of you being “a sounding board” and “helping people think through a fundamentally difficult and personal decision”, compared to you “hav[ing] a bunch of information [advisees] don’t”?
My underlying question is whether I (and other EAs) should spend much more time concretely planning my career than I am. (See here for my background thoughts.) If advising is valuable because it forces people to sit down and seriously plan their careers, then people could get the same value by planning on their own time. On the other hand, if the value of advising is something unique to 80k—information, insights, abilities, connections—then people probably can’t replicate the success of advising alone.
In general, do you think most EAs aren’t spending enough time on concrete career planning? In your opinion, how much of the benefit of advising could be achieved by someone independent of 80k by seriously researching and planning for a day?
Do you actually use the A/B/Z career planning tool described here? Is that out of date? Do you think that’s a very good way to plan your career, or might you suggest others?
Do you actually use the A/B/Z career planning tool described here? Is that out of date? Do you think that’s a very good way to plan your career, or might you suggest others?
We still endorse the general gist of ‘come up with an A/B/Z plan’, but no longer use that specific tool. Our more up to date framework is here.
I think the idea of doing an A/B/Z plan is a really good one. My impression is that because applying for jobs is so aversive, people often minimise the number of things they apply for both by not aiming as high as they could and by not considering what they would do if things really went worse than they’re expecting. Hiring processes seem to contain quite a lot of randomness, and even when they don’t are hard to predict from the outset. That means it seems worth both shooting for things that you have only a small chance of getting but would be excellent if you do get them, and worth making sure you know what your back up would be if things go much worse than you expect.
One thing to say about these is that people sometimes read ‘plan A’ as ‘the role I most want’ and ‘plan B’ as ‘another role, which is easier to get’. In fact, ‘plan A’ is intended to be some type of role—for example, going to grad school—so would itself involve applying to a whole range of specific options of differing levels of competitiveness.
> Which individual parts of advising do you think are the most and least valuable? You listed these components above, which are most critical?
From the advising sessions I’ve done, the cases where I’ve been able to add most value seem to be the ones where I knew about some specific organisation / role / project that the person wasn’t aware of and would be a good fit for, which I could tell them about and encourage them to apply for. I actually think this is rather unfortunate, because I’d like EAs to be exploring broadly and getting involved in many different sectors and organisations. For this reason, I think the work Maria is doing on expanding our job board is really important—it means being able to discuss concretely roles at many different foundations, specific roles to get research assistant experience etc.
From looking through past cases where people made large impactful plan changes based on talking to the team a couple of things seemed to come out as particularly significant: recommending particular resources and providing encouragement. (Note that the number of plan changes I was looking over here wasn’t super long—it was only the ones that were most significant, and for which we had enough information that I could put together a pretty comprehensive story of what caused them to change their plans.) ‘Encouragement’ sometimes here meant providing an outside view that the person’s plan seemed sensible and plausibly impactful despite being non traditional, and sometimes meant making clear that the person was very welcome in the EA community and that it was worth their applying to various specific opportunities even though they might feel that they were underqualified. Another which seemed useful was making introductions, though that is less dependable, because while there are usually useful resources to point a person to on whatever they’d be interested to know more about, it’s more hit and miss whether we happen to know someone it would be sensible for them to be introduced to.
It’s a bit more difficult to say which things are least valuable—there are various things which came up in fewer cases of people making impactful career changes, but I didn’t notice ones where I thought it would be very useful to people and then they never came up as useful. All the others I mentioned came up sometimes but not frequently as being useful. I think discussing cause prioritisation might be something that is less useful than I would have intuitively thought, where my guess at why is that it requires a lot of thought, not just a couple of minutes conversation.
For some components it seems particularly tough to figure out whether or not they’re useful—in the case of helping someone to form a concrete plan, or simply getting the person to think seriously about their long term career, it’s really hard to figure out whether the session made any difference or whether they would have done that themselves anyway. It seems pretty likely the person themselves doesn’t know the answer to this counterfactual.
“Can you say more about the relative value with advising of you being “a sounding board” and “helping people think through a fundamentally difficult and personal decision”, compared to you “hav[ing] a bunch of information [advisees] don’t”?
My underlying question is whether I (and other EAs) should spend much more time concretely planning my career than I am. (See here for my background thoughts.) If advising is valuable because it forces people to sit down and seriously plan their careers, then people could get the same value by planning on their own time. On the other hand, if the value of advising is something unique to 80k—information, insights, abilities, connections—then people probably can’t replicate the success of advising alone.
In general, do you think most EAs aren’t spending enough time on concrete career planning? In your opinion, how much of the benefit of advising could be achieved by someone independent of 80k by seriously researching and planning for a day?”
As much as possible, we try to write up or discuss on the podcast information which we think would help people with career decisions, so in a way you might expect that the vast majority of the benefit of advising should be coming from things like being a sounding board. It is of course hard to find specifically the information that applies to you amongst all the information available, so that’s something I’d expect to be able to continue to help with. And people often have specific gaps in their knowledge where they haven’t come across some specific concept / possible role yet. But overall I do think it’s the case that a lot of the benefit is coming from people taking the time to sit down and think seriously about their career in a way they might not have otherwise. Some evidence for this is the fact that people fairly often report that simply filling in the preparation document for the call is useful for them. (It asks: what options are you considering and why; what kinds of roles are you most suited for; what are your key uncertainties)
I very much agree with the comment you linked to, and I’m really glad to hear you’re thinking of turning it into a top level post. I guess I don’t know how much time most EAs spend planning their career, but I would expect that for most people they could get a lot of benefit by doing more of it. Thinking through what the best types or roles apply for would be, researching specific roles and then applying to competitive things you think you only have a small chance of getting are all really aversive. Standard careers advice doesn’t tend to give a terribly helpful framework for doing these in a way that will be most impactful. So I think there are good reasons why almost all of us put too little time into this, and why having specific time allotted to it and a person to talk it through with would be helpful. I definitely think people can put themselves in a good position to make these decisions though. This article gives an outline of the process people could follow to make a career decision. Once you have some of these thoughts written down, getting a friend to give comments on it and discuss it through with you seems useful. They might also be able to be an accountability buddy, to help you apply widely even when that feels frustrating and time consuming. For many people this can get quite a bit of the benefit of our advising. That’s particularly true of those who have already read widely about EA topics and know others in the community. Having done this before doing advising with us is also really helpful because it means we can tell better which people we’ll be most useful for, and with them focus on the the parts that we can add that the person couldn’t as easily do themselves (like more in depth information, or making introductions).
Thanks so much for doing this, your answers are really informative. :)
Here’s a bunch of questions, all of them tied together, so feel no obligation to answer all (or any) of them.
Which individual parts of advising do you think are the most and least valuable? You listed these components above, which are most critical?
Can you say more about the relative value with advising of you being “a sounding board” and “helping people think through a fundamentally difficult and personal decision”, compared to you “hav[ing] a bunch of information [advisees] don’t”?
My underlying question is whether I (and other EAs) should spend much more time concretely planning my career than I am. (See here for my background thoughts.) If advising is valuable because it forces people to sit down and seriously plan their careers, then people could get the same value by planning on their own time. On the other hand, if the value of advising is something unique to 80k—information, insights, abilities, connections—then people probably can’t replicate the success of advising alone.
In general, do you think most EAs aren’t spending enough time on concrete career planning? In your opinion, how much of the benefit of advising could be achieved by someone independent of 80k by seriously researching and planning for a day?
Do you actually use the A/B/Z career planning tool described here? Is that out of date? Do you think that’s a very good way to plan your career, or might you suggest others?
We still endorse the general gist of ‘come up with an A/B/Z plan’, but no longer use that specific tool. Our more up to date framework is here.
I think the idea of doing an A/B/Z plan is a really good one. My impression is that because applying for jobs is so aversive, people often minimise the number of things they apply for both by not aiming as high as they could and by not considering what they would do if things really went worse than they’re expecting. Hiring processes seem to contain quite a lot of randomness, and even when they don’t are hard to predict from the outset. That means it seems worth both shooting for things that you have only a small chance of getting but would be excellent if you do get them, and worth making sure you know what your back up would be if things go much worse than you expect.
One thing to say about these is that people sometimes read ‘plan A’ as ‘the role I most want’ and ‘plan B’ as ‘another role, which is easier to get’. In fact, ‘plan A’ is intended to be some type of role—for example, going to grad school—so would itself involve applying to a whole range of specific options of differing levels of competitiveness.
Thanks a ton for these responses Michelle, very helpful. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to you soon with some more questions and clarifications.
> Which individual parts of advising do you think are the most and least valuable? You listed these components above, which are most critical?
From the advising sessions I’ve done, the cases where I’ve been able to add most value seem to be the ones where I knew about some specific organisation / role / project that the person wasn’t aware of and would be a good fit for, which I could tell them about and encourage them to apply for. I actually think this is rather unfortunate, because I’d like EAs to be exploring broadly and getting involved in many different sectors and organisations. For this reason, I think the work Maria is doing on expanding our job board is really important—it means being able to discuss concretely roles at many different foundations, specific roles to get research assistant experience etc.
From looking through past cases where people made large impactful plan changes based on talking to the team a couple of things seemed to come out as particularly significant: recommending particular resources and providing encouragement. (Note that the number of plan changes I was looking over here wasn’t super long—it was only the ones that were most significant, and for which we had enough information that I could put together a pretty comprehensive story of what caused them to change their plans.) ‘Encouragement’ sometimes here meant providing an outside view that the person’s plan seemed sensible and plausibly impactful despite being non traditional, and sometimes meant making clear that the person was very welcome in the EA community and that it was worth their applying to various specific opportunities even though they might feel that they were underqualified. Another which seemed useful was making introductions, though that is less dependable, because while there are usually useful resources to point a person to on whatever they’d be interested to know more about, it’s more hit and miss whether we happen to know someone it would be sensible for them to be introduced to.
It’s a bit more difficult to say which things are least valuable—there are various things which came up in fewer cases of people making impactful career changes, but I didn’t notice ones where I thought it would be very useful to people and then they never came up as useful. All the others I mentioned came up sometimes but not frequently as being useful. I think discussing cause prioritisation might be something that is less useful than I would have intuitively thought, where my guess at why is that it requires a lot of thought, not just a couple of minutes conversation.
For some components it seems particularly tough to figure out whether or not they’re useful—in the case of helping someone to form a concrete plan, or simply getting the person to think seriously about their long term career, it’s really hard to figure out whether the session made any difference or whether they would have done that themselves anyway. It seems pretty likely the person themselves doesn’t know the answer to this counterfactual.
As much as possible, we try to write up or discuss on the podcast information which we think would help people with career decisions, so in a way you might expect that the vast majority of the benefit of advising should be coming from things like being a sounding board. It is of course hard to find specifically the information that applies to you amongst all the information available, so that’s something I’d expect to be able to continue to help with. And people often have specific gaps in their knowledge where they haven’t come across some specific concept / possible role yet. But overall I do think it’s the case that a lot of the benefit is coming from people taking the time to sit down and think seriously about their career in a way they might not have otherwise. Some evidence for this is the fact that people fairly often report that simply filling in the preparation document for the call is useful for them. (It asks: what options are you considering and why; what kinds of roles are you most suited for; what are your key uncertainties)
I very much agree with the comment you linked to, and I’m really glad to hear you’re thinking of turning it into a top level post. I guess I don’t know how much time most EAs spend planning their career, but I would expect that for most people they could get a lot of benefit by doing more of it. Thinking through what the best types or roles apply for would be, researching specific roles and then applying to competitive things you think you only have a small chance of getting are all really aversive. Standard careers advice doesn’t tend to give a terribly helpful framework for doing these in a way that will be most impactful. So I think there are good reasons why almost all of us put too little time into this, and why having specific time allotted to it and a person to talk it through with would be helpful. I definitely think people can put themselves in a good position to make these decisions though. This article gives an outline of the process people could follow to make a career decision. Once you have some of these thoughts written down, getting a friend to give comments on it and discuss it through with you seems useful. They might also be able to be an accountability buddy, to help you apply widely even when that feels frustrating and time consuming. For many people this can get quite a bit of the benefit of our advising. That’s particularly true of those who have already read widely about EA topics and know others in the community. Having done this before doing advising with us is also really helpful because it means we can tell better which people we’ll be most useful for, and with them focus on the the parts that we can add that the person couldn’t as easily do themselves (like more in depth information, or making introductions).