Thank you for writing this! Your observations match many of my intuitions about the career advising landscape, it’s really helpful to get the confirmation since your team has been doing this for so many years.
This is one of the most useful posts I’ve read on the forum this year.
Thank you Vaidehi, this means a lot, it’s always such a trade-off between the amount of time it takes to write a post that is understandable to other vs. using our time on something else, so this was really nice to hear.
Would be curious to hear what intuitions you have that resonated the most with this post? And any that you have that weren’t mentioned 👀
well worth the time, and for sure! here are a few thoughts:
importance of targeted channels / personas, building a funnel, focus on the user
+10000 and advice i’ve given to folks working on any kind of CB / meta work. targeting users is always a good think (and you can always increase the personas you support over time). careers just take time to change, very much a marathon not a sprint (low hanging fruit are limited).
EA overall (EA thinking, funders, some parts of the EA community) have more blindspots / a lot of suspicion around longer impact timelines (this has it’s benefits / it’s good to stay focused and it’s very easy to avoid hard questions when your TOC becomes too long). But I think this has resulted in a lack of infra / longer term thinking especially when it comes to career advising. I want to get a more diverse funding landscape with funders taking slightly different strategies and doing active grantmaking to hopefully foster more of this.
talent density on a team
I like the “hire slowly fire quickly” framing—although it can be tough in practice. I think it’s really easy to get into scarcity mindset around hires / fear the cost of replacing a team member.
hiring is hard (yes! especially for meta work!)
adding more sectors for careers
i am very curious on what your research finds re finding more impactful jobs / removing that as a bottleneck for impact—that’s something i’ve been thinking about a bit in the GCBR context (where there are even fewer very explicitly EA/GCBR aligned orgs, and a lot of opportunities for impact are at other places).
(Also i can’t believe it’s already been 5 years—congrats on that!!)
Thank you for writing this! Your observations match many of my intuitions about the career advising landscape, it’s really helpful to get the confirmation since your team has been doing this for so many years.
This is one of the most useful posts I’ve read on the forum this year.
Thank you Vaidehi, this means a lot, it’s always such a trade-off between the amount of time it takes to write a post that is understandable to other vs. using our time on something else, so this was really nice to hear.
Would be curious to hear what intuitions you have that resonated the most with this post? And any that you have that weren’t mentioned 👀
well worth the time, and for sure! here are a few thoughts:
importance of targeted channels / personas, building a funnel, focus on the user
+10000 and advice i’ve given to folks working on any kind of CB / meta work. targeting users is always a good think (and you can always increase the personas you support over time). careers just take time to change, very much a marathon not a sprint (low hanging fruit are limited).
EA overall (EA thinking, funders, some parts of the EA community) have more blindspots / a lot of suspicion around longer impact timelines (this has it’s benefits / it’s good to stay focused and it’s very easy to avoid hard questions when your TOC becomes too long). But I think this has resulted in a lack of infra / longer term thinking especially when it comes to career advising. I want to get a more diverse funding landscape with funders taking slightly different strategies and doing active grantmaking to hopefully foster more of this.
talent density on a team
I like the “hire slowly fire quickly” framing—although it can be tough in practice. I think it’s really easy to get into scarcity mindset around hires / fear the cost of replacing a team member.
hiring is hard (yes! especially for meta work!)
adding more sectors for careers i am very curious on what your research finds re finding more impactful jobs / removing that as a bottleneck for impact—that’s something i’ve been thinking about a bit in the GCBR context (where there are even fewer very explicitly EA/GCBR aligned orgs, and a lot of opportunities for impact are at other places).
(Also i can’t believe it’s already been 5 years—congrats on that!!)