TLDR: Is it good that the EA ‘bootcamps’ tends to spend resources on thinking about career paths rather than developing useful skills?
I have a vague impression that the various ‘bootcamps’ around effective altruism tend to focus on something like “motivation, encouragement, and peer support for thinking about (and planning for) impactful career paths” rather than “gaining skills.” I keep thinking that we have plenty of people involved in EA who are onboard with the general ideas and who want to contribute, but who lack specific skills. Is this a good thing?
This is all pretty low confidence/exploratory, as I haven’t participated in High Impact Professionals, or CEA’s Bootcamps, only read about and heard about them.
I’m mainly thinking about people management, budgeting, project management, and similar general professional skills; of course there is also broadly a need for more specific skills, like AI safety researcher.
I keep thinking that we have plenty of people involved in EA who are onboard with the general ideas and who want to contribute, but who lack specific skills. Is this a good thing?
It seems there are two ways to solve this: Upskill motivated people or help skilled people stay motivated throughout the career transition. While there are enough resources outside impact areas to help people upskill and more traditional jobs, an impactful talent org can better support the latter.
When people are surprised that you would need motivation to switch jobs without upskilling, I like to point them to Jim Chapman’s post, who went through dozens of applications, rejections, and several programs as an experienced professional. This is a pretty typical journey that we see at Successif as we have written about here. Programs like HIP and the CEA Bootcamp also support this (similar the School for Moral Ambition).
A couple of years ago, almost all programs in this space were for people who still needed upskilling, and I think this led organizations to sometimes hire people who didn’t have the necessary skills and who had to learn on the job. Having experienced professionals join seems better to me for most orgs.
Are there specific skills that you see that regular training programs don’t do well and might be better suited to offer specifically for our ecosystem?
Are there specific skills that you see that regular training programs don’t do well and might be better suited to offer specifically for our ecosystem?
Hmmm, that is a good prompt. I can’t really think of any. I do want to see more EAs know how to manage people, to understand what project management actually is, to understand how to run a meeting, how to develop a team, and so on. But those aren’t skills that EA has a comparative advantage in training people. 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. But that is probably less efficient than finding people who already have the experience/skills/competencies. So I guess I’ve been viewing this more emotionally rather than rationally.
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 think an “EA MBA” would be a great thing for someone to run, actually. I think EA probably has an advantage in running this kind of stuff: people used to measuring and monitoring their impact don’t fall down the hole of what I’ll call “business training bullshit” as much.
I just think the EAs receiving such training should pay for the full cost themselves, because (assuming it’s good) you’d very quickly become overwhelmed with applications from people who want great-value professional development and have no desire to actually do EA things at the end of it. And you don’t want EA money to be subsidising such people.
Maybe you could have a separate bursary scheme for bona-fide EAs.
(to be clear I think that providing good-value professional development services to altruistically-inclined young adults is a good use of “EA worker time”, just not of “EA money”)
Teaching people skills takes time and different jobs require different skills. I haven’t done this program either, but I expect that inspiring people to pursue a career and improving their clarity around what this might look like is both more general and can be achieved more quickly.
I’m unsure how effective bootcamps like this can be? Depends in the cause, but for areas like animal welfare the best skull building comes from getting directly involved. In these cases, it seems that directing people to opportunities which expose them to those skills is much more impactful than attempting to impart those skills via a boot camp. I’m also unsure if EA groups are well equipped to know what’s skills are most on demand and, more importantly, how to develope them.
I agree if this is possible we should attempt this more often.
TLDR: Is it good that the EA ‘bootcamps’ tends to spend resources on thinking about career paths rather than developing useful skills?
I have a vague impression that the various ‘bootcamps’ around effective altruism tend to focus on something like “motivation, encouragement, and peer support for thinking about (and planning for) impactful career paths” rather than “gaining skills.” I keep thinking that we have plenty of people involved in EA who are onboard with the general ideas and who want to contribute, but who lack specific skills. Is this a good thing?
This is all pretty low confidence/exploratory, as I haven’t participated in High Impact Professionals, or CEA’s Bootcamps, only read about and heard about them.
I’m mainly thinking about people management, budgeting, project management, and similar general professional skills; of course there is also broadly a need for more specific skills, like AI safety researcher.
It seems there are two ways to solve this: Upskill motivated people or help skilled people stay motivated throughout the career transition. While there are enough resources outside impact areas to help people upskill and more traditional jobs, an impactful talent org can better support the latter.
When people are surprised that you would need motivation to switch jobs without upskilling, I like to point them to Jim Chapman’s post, who went through dozens of applications, rejections, and several programs as an experienced professional. This is a pretty typical journey that we see at Successif as we have written about here. Programs like HIP and the CEA Bootcamp also support this (similar the School for Moral Ambition).
A couple of years ago, almost all programs in this space were for people who still needed upskilling, and I think this led organizations to sometimes hire people who didn’t have the necessary skills and who had to learn on the job. Having experienced professionals join seems better to me for most orgs.
Are there specific skills that you see that regular training programs don’t do well and might be better suited to offer specifically for our ecosystem?
Hmmm, that is a good prompt. I can’t really think of any. I do want to see more EAs know how to manage people, to understand what project management actually is, to understand how to run a meeting, how to develop a team, and so on. But those aren’t skills that EA has a comparative advantage in training people. 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. But that is probably less efficient than finding people who already have the experience/skills/competencies. So I guess I’ve been viewing this more emotionally rather than rationally.
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 think an “EA MBA” would be a great thing for someone to run, actually. I think EA probably has an advantage in running this kind of stuff: people used to measuring and monitoring their impact don’t fall down the hole of what I’ll call “business training bullshit” as much.
I just think the EAs receiving such training should pay for the full cost themselves, because (assuming it’s good) you’d very quickly become overwhelmed with applications from people who want great-value professional development and have no desire to actually do EA things at the end of it. And you don’t want EA money to be subsidising such people.
Maybe you could have a separate bursary scheme for bona-fide EAs.
(to be clear I think that providing good-value professional development services to altruistically-inclined young adults is a good use of “EA worker time”, just not of “EA money”)
Teaching people skills takes time and different jobs require different skills. I haven’t done this program either, but I expect that inspiring people to pursue a career and improving their clarity around what this might look like is both more general and can be achieved more quickly.
I’m unsure how effective bootcamps like this can be? Depends in the cause, but for areas like animal welfare the best skull building comes from getting directly involved. In these cases, it seems that directing people to opportunities which expose them to those skills is much more impactful than attempting to impart those skills via a boot camp. I’m also unsure if EA groups are well equipped to know what’s skills are most on demand and, more importantly, how to develope them.
I agree if this is possible we should attempt this more often.