I think this idea is really great ! Since I’m early career, I’m going to share my plans more than my actual work, but hopefully there will be some value to this! (And I’m happy to chat with anyone offline about this topic in more depth as well)
This would probably be most relevant to people interested in operations & management, or if you one day might start and org or join an early-stage org.
Where do you work, and what do you do?
Context: I graduated in May 2019 with a BA in Sociology, and have been working since then.
I work at an enterprise software company (software like SAP, ORACLE & Salesforce), currently focused on marketing and sales in Singapore. Before that I worked at a boutique consulting firm that specialised in accounting software implementation for utilities companies. (Yes, it’s all as dull as it sounds :D)
My current plan is to continue at my current company for at least 1.5 more years, possibly more depending on how flexible the hours are/how much I’m learning (currently, the learning curve is very steep, and I don’t expect it to plateau for at least that amount of time).
What are a few ways in which you bring EA ideas/mindsets to your current job?
I mostly have the mindset of skilling up and trying to take ownership of projects, and have been lucky in my current job that I have a lot of flexibility in that regard. I think that if you do have the flexibility, even if your job is boring (reminder: the company I work for essentially sells very fancy accounting software), you can kind of gamify it into “what useful skills can I learn today?”.
Overall, I feel like learning these skills in a low(ish) stakes scenario (at least, impact-wise) is nice, because if I make mistakes, or take longer than I need to it’s fine, I have a much longer rope to make mistakes.
A lot of the following skills you could learn at any job, but I think mentally thinking of them as “learning” rather than “stuff I have to do to get paid” is probably a better framing.
From speaking with a few mid- or late-stage career EAs, I’ve gotten the advice that they’ve been able to contribute a lot from the corporate skills they’ve learnt.
It can be tempting to do EA things full-time, every so often I remind myself that I have at least ~45 good years left in my career, and all the things I’m learning now while earning to save are things that will ultimately make the marginal dollar donated to the org where I may work in the future more valuable because I’ll spend my time better, have a larger network to leverage, or just more wisdom about how to set up a new project, make the right hires etc.
General skills
Attention to detail & organisation (e.g. extremely small things like consistent naming conventions, properly structured if weird-looking emails etc.)
How to interact in a workplace with many different people with different motivations & goals
Realising what needs to be in place in an organisation (this is really vague, but basically, seeing something is mising & realising why it was so important—e.g. a company intranet, good inbox management systems)
Specific operational skills
Recruiting:
Creating a recruiting process: I used a lot of EA resources to design this and choose the right work tests, although it’s definitely something you learn through trial & error
Creating a applicant tracking system: I got an excuse to learn Airtable (it’s so cool!) and save me time by automating the process while doing so
Learning how to filter people: This is probably the most important thing—no matter where you work, if you want to get to a mangerial level, you will need to know how to recruit people. This is difficult, especially when you’re trying to evaluate someone’s personality fit for the company (this is harder when the company culture is not fully defined or you’re not aware of it) or recruiting in cultures you haven’t spent a lot of time in.
Marketing:
I’m not a professional marketer, so I had to learn a bunch about the basics of marketing, SEO, and copywriting (enough to distinguish what is good and bad, which is a pretty useful skill when hiring I think)
I’ve also been trying to develop a marketing strategy for the company, which has been an interesting process because there’s definitely
Sales
A lot of sales is really understanding your target audience & being able to speak to them in the right way, and understanding what you’re talking about and knowing it really, really well. I feel like being able to talk to complete strangers and maintain a friendly rapport is a useful life-skill,to have.
What are some things you’ve worked on that you consider impactful?
I think I’m too early in my career to have really had a lot of impact, but I work on a few EA community building projects that I think are either low hanging fruit, or important and neglected, specifically focused on careers.
These are done in my spare time, and I’m lucky that I have enough flexibility to work on them as well as my job
I think there’s usually a lot of synergy in what I learn on my EA projects & work, which is nice.
I think this idea is really great ! Since I’m early career, I’m going to share my plans more than my actual work, but hopefully there will be some value to this! (And I’m happy to chat with anyone offline about this topic in more depth as well)
This would probably be most relevant to people interested in operations & management, or if you one day might start and org or join an early-stage org.
Where do you work, and what do you do?
Context: I graduated in May 2019 with a BA in Sociology, and have been working since then.
I work at an enterprise software company (software like SAP, ORACLE & Salesforce), currently focused on marketing and sales in Singapore. Before that I worked at a boutique consulting firm that specialised in accounting software implementation for utilities companies. (Yes, it’s all as dull as it sounds :D)
My current plan is to continue at my current company for at least 1.5 more years, possibly more depending on how flexible the hours are/how much I’m learning (currently, the learning curve is very steep, and I don’t expect it to plateau for at least that amount of time).
What are a few ways in which you bring EA ideas/mindsets to your current job?
I mostly have the mindset of skilling up and trying to take ownership of projects, and have been lucky in my current job that I have a lot of flexibility in that regard. I think that if you do have the flexibility, even if your job is boring (reminder: the company I work for essentially sells very fancy accounting software), you can kind of gamify it into “what useful skills can I learn today?”.
Overall, I feel like learning these skills in a low(ish) stakes scenario (at least, impact-wise) is nice, because if I make mistakes, or take longer than I need to it’s fine, I have a much longer rope to make mistakes.
A lot of the following skills you could learn at any job, but I think mentally thinking of them as “learning” rather than “stuff I have to do to get paid” is probably a better framing.
From speaking with a few mid- or late-stage career EAs, I’ve gotten the advice that they’ve been able to contribute a lot from the corporate skills they’ve learnt.
It can be tempting to do EA things full-time, every so often I remind myself that I have at least ~45 good years left in my career, and all the things I’m learning now while earning to save are things that will ultimately make the marginal dollar donated to the org where I may work in the future more valuable because I’ll spend my time better, have a larger network to leverage, or just more wisdom about how to set up a new project, make the right hires etc.
General skills
Attention to detail & organisation (e.g. extremely small things like consistent naming conventions, properly structured if weird-looking emails etc.)
How to interact in a workplace with many different people with different motivations & goals
Managing contractors/people (and writing contracts).
Realising what needs to be in place in an organisation (this is really vague, but basically, seeing something is mising & realising why it was so important—e.g. a company intranet, good inbox management systems)
Specific operational skills
Recruiting:
Creating a recruiting process: I used a lot of EA resources to design this and choose the right work tests, although it’s definitely something you learn through trial & error
Creating a applicant tracking system: I got an excuse to learn Airtable (it’s so cool!) and save me time by automating the process while doing so
Learning how to filter people: This is probably the most important thing—no matter where you work, if you want to get to a mangerial level, you will need to know how to recruit people. This is difficult, especially when you’re trying to evaluate someone’s personality fit for the company (this is harder when the company culture is not fully defined or you’re not aware of it) or recruiting in cultures you haven’t spent a lot of time in.
Marketing:
I’m not a professional marketer, so I had to learn a bunch about the basics of marketing, SEO, and copywriting (enough to distinguish what is good and bad, which is a pretty useful skill when hiring I think)
I’ve also been trying to develop a marketing strategy for the company, which has been an interesting process because there’s definitely
Sales
A lot of sales is really understanding your target audience & being able to speak to them in the right way, and understanding what you’re talking about and knowing it really, really well. I feel like being able to talk to complete strangers and maintain a friendly rapport is a useful life-skill,to have.
What are some things you’ve worked on that you consider impactful?
I think I’m too early in my career to have really had a lot of impact, but I work on a few EA community building projects that I think are either low hanging fruit, or important and neglected, specifically focused on careers.
These are done in my spare time, and I’m lucky that I have enough flexibility to work on them as well as my job
I think there’s usually a lot of synergy in what I learn on my EA projects & work, which is nice.