Some musings about experience and coaching. I saw another announcement relating to mentorship/coaching/career advising recently. It looked like the mentors/coaches/advisors were all relatively junior/young/inexperienced. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this. Most of this type of thing I’ve seen in and around EA involves the mentors/advisors/coaches being only a few years into their career. This isn’t necessarily bad. A person can be very well-read without having gone to school, or can be very strong without going to a gym, or can speak excellent Japanese without having ever been to Japan. A person being two or three or four years into their career doesn’t mean that it is impossible for them to have have good ideas and good advice.[1] But it does seem a little… odd. The skepticism I feel is similar to having a physically frail person as a fitness trainer: I am assessing the individual on a proxy (fitness) rather than on the true criteria (ability to advise me regarding fitness). Maybe that thinking is a bit too sloppy on my part.
This doesn’t mean that if you are 24 and you volunteer as a mentor that you should stop; you aren’t doing anything wrong. And I wouldn’t want some kind a silly and arbitrary rule, such as “only people age 40+ are allowed to be career coaches.” And there are some people doing this kind of work that have a decade or more of professional experience; I don’t want to make it sound like all of the people doing coaching and advising are fresh grads.
I wonder if there are any specific advantages or disadvantages to this ‘junior skew.’ Is there a meaningful correlation between length of career and ability to help other people with their careers?
EA already skews somewhat young, but from the last EA community survey it looks like the average age was around 29. So I wonder why are the vast majority of people doing mentorship/coaching/career advising are younger than that? Maybe the older people involved in EA are disproportionality not employed for EA organizations and are thus less focused on funneling people into impactful careers? I do have the vague impression that many 35+ EAs lean more toward earn-to-give. Maybe older EAs tend to be a little more private and less focused on the EA community? Maybe older people simply are less interested, or don’t view it as a priority? Maybe the organizations that employ/hire coaches all prefer young people? Maybe this is a false perception and I’m engaging in sloppy generalization from only a few anecdotes?
And the other huge caveat is that you can’t really know what a person’s professional background is from a quick glance at their LinkedIn Profile and the blurb that they share on a website, any more than you can accurately guess age from a profile photo. People sometimes don’t list everything. I can see that someone earned a bachelor’s degree in 2019 or 2020 or 2021, but maybe they didn’t follow a “standard” path: maybe they had a 10-year career prior to that, so guesses about being fairly young or junior are totally off. As always, drawing conclusions based on tiny snippets of information with minimal context is treacherous territory.
EA already skews somewhat young, but from the last EA community survey it looks like the average age was around 29. So I wonder why are the vast majority of people doing mentorship/coaching/career advising are younger than that? Maybe the older people involved in EA are disproportionality not employed for EA organizations and are thus less focused on funneling people into impactful careers?
I checked and people who currently work in an EA org are only slightly older on average (median 29 vs median 28).
Some musings about experience and coaching. I saw another announcement relating to mentorship/coaching/career advising recently. It looked like the mentors/coaches/advisors were all relatively junior/young/inexperienced. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this. Most of this type of thing I’ve seen in and around EA involves the mentors/advisors/coaches being only a few years into their career. This isn’t necessarily bad. A person can be very well-read without having gone to school, or can be very strong without going to a gym, or can speak excellent Japanese without having ever been to Japan. A person being two or three or four years into their career doesn’t mean that it is impossible for them to have have good ideas and good advice.[1] But it does seem a little… odd. The skepticism I feel is similar to having a physically frail person as a fitness trainer: I am assessing the individual on a proxy (fitness) rather than on the true criteria (ability to advise me regarding fitness). Maybe that thinking is a bit too sloppy on my part.
This doesn’t mean that if you are 24 and you volunteer as a mentor that you should stop; you aren’t doing anything wrong. And I wouldn’t want some kind a silly and arbitrary rule, such as “only people age 40+ are allowed to be career coaches.” And there are some people doing this kind of work that have a decade or more of professional experience; I don’t want to make it sound like all of the people doing coaching and advising are fresh grads.
I wonder if there are any specific advantages or disadvantages to this ‘junior skew.’ Is there a meaningful correlation between length of career and ability to help other people with their careers?
EA already skews somewhat young, but from the last EA community survey it looks like the average age was around 29. So I wonder why are the vast majority of people doing mentorship/coaching/career advising are younger than that? Maybe the older people involved in EA are disproportionality not employed for EA organizations and are thus less focused on funneling people into impactful careers? I do have the vague impression that many 35+ EAs lean more toward earn-to-give. Maybe older EAs tend to be a little more private and less focused on the EA community? Maybe older people simply are less interested, or don’t view it as a priority? Maybe the organizations that employ/hire coaches all prefer young people? Maybe this is a false perception and I’m engaging in sloppy generalization from only a few anecdotes?
And the other huge caveat is that you can’t really know what a person’s professional background is from a quick glance at their LinkedIn Profile and the blurb that they share on a website, any more than you can accurately guess age from a profile photo. People sometimes don’t list everything. I can see that someone earned a bachelor’s degree in 2019 or 2020 or 2021, but maybe they didn’t follow a “standard” path: maybe they had a 10-year career prior to that, so guesses about being fairly young or junior are totally off. As always, drawing conclusions based on tiny snippets of information with minimal context is treacherous territory.
I checked and people who currently work in an EA org are only slightly older on average (median 29 vs median 28).