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I had several conversations with ‘specialists’ after my 80k advising call, and personally found the seemingly generic ‘tell me about your career path’ information surprisingly helpful! I found that people usually ended up sharing little tidbits of information that helped clarify the landscape of different fields, who is entering them and by what channels, and what alternative pathways might look like.
I personally find it extremely useful when people provide questions beforehand, even if it’s just a couple of bulletpoints. But I’ve also found (in contexts other than this[1]) that sometimes asking people to send a few bulletpoints is too high a barrier to entry and they just won’t do that. So I’d suggest making this a suggestion, rather than something that sounds more like a requirement.
e.g. when people are requesting surveys.
Good to know, thank you!
All fantastic advice and resonates with my experience on both sides of the aisle here. I was racking my brain for things I’d disagree with or add and I struggled, because I think you’ve covered it pretty well.
One thing I might add, is to be open to challenging (gently and with great care) basic assumptions career seekers might have even early in the conversation. It often surprises me how people dismiss or haven’t even considered certain ideas (such as starting their own thing/org), or are stuck thinking thinking down certain paths. People think things are impossible which may be very possible.
Sometimes when you aren’t so personally close to someone, its actually easier to challenge assumptions early in the conversation.
I think this challenging of career assumptions is especially valuable to people who are young or new to an area.
I’ve seen people before tunnel vision towards a particular path due to missing some details in the field as a whole and all their questions presupposed some sort of path.
Challenging this can help see the tradeoffs of decisions more clearly.
Thanks for this post Michelle! This seems like generally useful advice, and maybe EAG attendees should read it as well.
I’m curious:
What kind of specialists does the advising team feel unusually bottlenecked by access to right now?
Same for advisees?
Do you feel constrained most heavily by access to specialists vs advisees right now?
No worries about responding if you’re busy :)
One type of specialist we’re pretty bottlenecked on is people who work in cybersecurity, and have a good sense of how to succed in that industry.
On advisees, we’re particularly keen to speak to people later on in their careers, who can credibly join government agencies who care a lot about years of experience.
I would say that it’s reasonably even on these right now, and actually what we’re most bottlenecked on is hiring to our team. If you know someone who you’d appreciate getting career advice from, please encourage them to apply!
Thanks for sharing this. How do you identify specialists with whom to arrange calls?
Thanks for the question! We find specialists in lots of different ways, including:
- People working at high impact orgs who we actively reach out to because we are fans of their work.
- People who applied for coaching themselves in the past—
Meeting them at conferences (we try to attend both generalist conferences like EA Global and more specialist ones like the AI Security Forum).
- People referred to us by others already in our network.
Thank you for writing about this. High Impact Medicine has also linked to several articles from our mentoring programme website (https://www.highimpactmedicine.org/mentorship-programme) on how to build mentoring relationships and suggestions for mentees and mentors. I’m sharing this in case it’s helpful to anyone reading :)