I guess I see so many EAs with alignment and general EA knowledge, but lacking these kinds of general professional skills, and I really want these people (who have devoted so much time and effort to EA) to have better professional competencies.
I very much agree with that. When people with no/​little professional experience ask me about getting into impactful work outside research, my default advice is to upskill outside impact orgs for a few years and then see how they can apply this experience later. Sometimes I fear that organizations in our space contribute to the problem by hiring more on the basis of value alignment than professional skills, with hiring managers sometimes not even aware of what the strongest candidate for a role could look like, as they don’t have experience with this.
This ultimately goes up to management, where I’m surprised to see few org founders hiring experienced CEOs and stepping into roles they are better suited to (Chief Strategist, Chief Researcher, Chief Policymaker, etc.). When I started my first startup straight out of school, this is what we did, and that enabled us to grow the org to over 100 people quickly. I would have been out of my depth at that time to hire the kind of middle management orgs need at that size.
That being said, at RAISEimpact, we help org leaders with hiring strategy and thinking about team composition and culture, so hopefully we can help in this way.
I very much agree with that. When people with no/​little professional experience ask me about getting into impactful work outside research, my default advice is to upskill outside impact orgs for a few years and then see how they can apply this experience later. Sometimes I fear that organizations in our space contribute to the problem by hiring more on the basis of value alignment than professional skills, with hiring managers sometimes not even aware of what the strongest candidate for a role could look like, as they don’t have experience with this.
This ultimately goes up to management, where I’m surprised to see few org founders hiring experienced CEOs and stepping into roles they are better suited to (Chief Strategist, Chief Researcher, Chief Policymaker, etc.). When I started my first startup straight out of school, this is what we did, and that enabled us to grow the org to over 100 people quickly. I would have been out of my depth at that time to hire the kind of middle management orgs need at that size.
That being said, at RAISEimpact, we help org leaders with hiring strategy and thinking about team composition and culture, so hopefully we can help in this way.