What will a company/organization that has a really important secondary mandate to focus on general career development of employees actually look like? How would trainings be structured, what would growth trajectories look like, etc?
When I was at Google, I got the distinct impression that while “career development” and “growth” were common buzzwords, most of the actual programs on offer were more focused on employee satisfaction/retention than growth. (For example, I’ve essentially never gotten any feedback on my selection of training courses or books that I bought with company money, which at the time I thought was awesome flexibility, but in retrospect was not a great sign of caring about growth on the part of the company).
Edit: Upon a reread I should mention that there are other ways for employees to grow within the company, eg by having some degree of autonomy over what projects they want to work on.
I think there are theoretical reasons for employee career growth being underinvested by default. Namely, that the costs of career growth are borne approximately equally between the employer and the employee (obviously this varies from case to case), while the benefits of career growth are mostly accrued by the employee and their future employers.
This view will predict that companies will mostly only invest in general career development/growth of employees if one of a number of conditions are met:
The investment is so valuable that it pays for itself over the expected length of the employee’s tenor
The “investment” has benefits to the company (and hopefully the employee as well) other than via building the employee’s skillsets. Eg, it makes the employee more likely to stay at the company.
Relatedly, the investment only grows (or disproportionately grows) the employee’s skillset in ways that’s relevant to the work of the company, and not that of other workplaces (even close competitors)
There are principal-agent problems within the company, such that managers are not always acting in the company’s best interest when they promote career development for their underlings.
I suppose that in contrast to companies, academia is at least incentivized to focus on general career development (since professors are judged at least somewhat on the quality of their graduate students’ outputs/career trajectories). I don’t know in practice how much better academia is than industry however. (It is at least suggestive that people often take very large pay cuts to do graduate school).
I think the question of how to do employee career development well is particularly interesting/relevant to EA organizations, since there’s a sense in which developing better employees is a net benefit to “team EA” even if your own org doesn’t benefit, or might die in a year or three. A (simplified) formal view of this is that effective altruism captures the value of career development over the expected span of someone continuing to do EA activities.*
*eg, doing EA-relevant research or policy work, donating, working at an EA org, etc.
Definitely agreed. That said, I think some of this should probably be looked through the lens of “Should EA as a whole help people with personal/career development rather than specific organizations, as the benefits will accrue to the larger community (especially if people only stay at orgs for a few years).
I’m personally in favor of expensive resources being granted to help people early in their careers. You can also see some of this in what OpenPhil/FHI funds; there’s a big focus on helping people get useful PhDs. (though this helps a small minority of the entire EA movement)
What will a company/organization that has a really important secondary mandate to focus on general career development of employees actually look like? How would trainings be structured, what would growth trajectories look like, etc?
When I was at Google, I got the distinct impression that while “career development” and “growth” were common buzzwords, most of the actual programs on offer were more focused on employee satisfaction/retention than growth. (For example, I’ve essentially never gotten any feedback on my selection of training courses or books that I bought with company money, which at the time I thought was awesome flexibility, but in retrospect was not a great sign of caring about growth on the part of the company).
Edit: Upon a reread I should mention that there are other ways for employees to grow within the company, eg by having some degree of autonomy over what projects they want to work on.
I think there are theoretical reasons for employee career growth being underinvested by default. Namely, that the costs of career growth are borne approximately equally between the employer and the employee (obviously this varies from case to case), while the benefits of career growth are mostly accrued by the employee and their future employers.
This view will predict that companies will mostly only invest in general career development/growth of employees if one of a number of conditions are met:
The investment is so valuable that it pays for itself over the expected length of the employee’s tenor
The “investment” has benefits to the company (and hopefully the employee as well) other than via building the employee’s skillsets. Eg, it makes the employee more likely to stay at the company.
Relatedly, the investment only grows (or disproportionately grows) the employee’s skillset in ways that’s relevant to the work of the company, and not that of other workplaces (even close competitors)
There are principal-agent problems within the company, such that managers are not always acting in the company’s best interest when they promote career development for their underlings.
I suppose that in contrast to companies, academia is at least incentivized to focus on general career development (since professors are judged at least somewhat on the quality of their graduate students’ outputs/career trajectories). I don’t know in practice how much better academia is than industry however. (It is at least suggestive that people often take very large pay cuts to do graduate school).
I think the question of how to do employee career development well is particularly interesting/relevant to EA organizations, since there’s a sense in which developing better employees is a net benefit to “team EA” even if your own org doesn’t benefit, or might die in a year or three. A (simplified) formal view of this is that effective altruism captures the value of career development over the expected span of someone continuing to do EA activities.*
*eg, doing EA-relevant research or policy work, donating, working at an EA org, etc.
Definitely agreed. That said, I think some of this should probably be looked through the lens of “Should EA as a whole help people with personal/career development rather than specific organizations, as the benefits will accrue to the larger community (especially if people only stay at orgs for a few years).
I’m personally in favor of expensive resources being granted to help people early in their careers. You can also see some of this in what OpenPhil/FHI funds; there’s a big focus on helping people get useful PhDs. (though this helps a small minority of the entire EA movement)