The main Swapcard example you mention seems to me like a misunderstanding of EAGs and 1-1s.
To take consulting as an example, say I am a 1st year undergrad looking to get into management consulting. I don’t need to speak to a consulting expert (probably they should change the name to be about experience instead of expertise), but I’d be very keen to get advice from someone who recently went through the whole consulting hiring process and got multiple offers, say someone a month out of undergrad.
Or another hypothetical: say I’m really interested in working in an operations/HR role within global health. I reach out to the handful of experts in the field who will be at the conference, but I want to fit in as many 1-1s as I can, and anyway the experts may be too busy, so I also reach out to someone who did an internship on the operations team of a global health charity during college. They’re not an expert in the field, but they could still brain-dump a bunch of stuff they learnt from the internship in 25 min.
And these could be about the same recently graduated person.
With the trekking example, I also know the person, and it seems extremely unlikely to me they were trying to gain power or influence (ie clout), by writing the post. It also seems to be the case that it did result in some minor outdoorsy career opportunities.
A lot of the points about transferability seem like they would apply to many job to job changes—e.g. ‘why would you think your experience running a startup would be transferable to working for a large corporation?’ But people change career direction all the time, and indeed EA has a large focus on helping people to do so.
The main Swapcard example you mention seems to me like a misunderstanding of EAGs and 1-1s.
To take consulting as an example, say I am a 1st year undergrad looking to get into management consulting. I don’t need to speak to a consulting expert (probably they should change the name to be about experience instead of expertise), but I’d be very keen to get advice from someone who recently went through the whole consulting hiring process and got multiple offers, say someone a month out of undergrad.
Or another hypothetical: say I’m really interested in working in an operations/HR role within global health. I reach out to the handful of experts in the field who will be at the conference, but I want to fit in as many 1-1s as I can, and anyway the experts may be too busy, so I also reach out to someone who did an internship on the operations team of a global health charity during college. They’re not an expert in the field, but they could still brain-dump a bunch of stuff they learnt from the internship in 25 min.
And these could be about the same recently graduated person.
With the trekking example, I also know the person, and it seems extremely unlikely to me they were trying to gain power or influence (ie clout), by writing the post. It also seems to be the case that it did result in some minor outdoorsy career opportunities.
A lot of the points about transferability seem like they would apply to many job to job changes—e.g. ‘why would you think your experience running a startup would be transferable to working for a large corporation?’ But people change career direction all the time, and indeed EA has a large focus on helping people to do so.