The promised additional, less important info on why I’m making this thread and how I suggest people use it
(I’ll split this info into different replies to this one comment.)
I highly recommend the post Asking for advice; I think people who want to get feedback on their career plans via this thread could gain by reading that. I also recommend the post Giving and receiving advice.
Here’s more of what the particularly relevant section of 80,000 Hours’ article on How to plan your career says:
Try to get feedback from people who understand your aim to have an impact, and can be supportive while they challenge your thinking. A ‘career-planning partner’ can be great if you can find someone to trade career plans with — you can critique each other’s plans and help each other generate more options, plus provide moral support. Our advisors may be able to help too.
How do you reach out to people? It depends on your relationship — but if the person is someone you don’t know as well or with whom you have a more formal relationship, these tips may be helpful. In these cases, it’s better to send one or two specific questions rather than your whole plan.
It can often be easier to reach out to people if you’re both part of a community focused on making a positive difference, because then they know helping you will help them further your shared goals.
If you get some negative feedback, don’t respond hastily. If your plan is unconventional — which is likely if you’re targeting something neglected — probably not everyone is going to agree with it. Try to understand the reasons behind their negative reaction, and decide whether to adjust. If the reasons are unclear, perhaps wait to see if others have a similar reaction or if it’s an isolated example.
On a similar note, I think it’d be really cool if this open thread led to people finding “career-planning partners”. (See also Rob Wiblin’s comments about how having a line manager can be surprisingly beneficial, and how it may be possible to capture a lot of those benefits by just having pairs of junior people who want more line management act as each other’s line managers.)
I expect a lot of people would benefit from going through 80,000 Hours career planning article and/or the accompanying worksheet.
I think this applies especially to people who haven’t yet spent a huge amount of time on career planning or reading articles from 80,000 Hours. But I worked through the article and worksheet recently and found it helpful, despite already having spent a lot of time on career planning, as well as having (I think) read almost all of 80,000 Hours main articles and many of the more blog-post-y ones too.
The trigger for me to make this open thread post was this comment thread. As I wrote there:
Your comment makes me think that something that might be really easy and really valuable is to just have an online space where people are encouraged to share docs outlining their career ideas, plans, and uncertainties [...], in order to get feedback and advice.[1]
Obviously people can already take the initiative to do that in ad hoc ways, either in public spaces (like you’ve done) or via reaching out to specific people. And that’s already useful. But I expect a lot of people who could benefit from this sort of thing would be too shy to do that, or just not think to do it, or be held back by not having enough of a network of relevant people.
Four options come to mind for how to do this:
Create an “open thread” on the EA Forum for people to share such things
Does anyone have thoughts on which of these options might be best? Maybe as a first step someone should just make an open thread and see how it goes?
[...]
[1] This also reminds me of Rob Wiblin’s comments about how having a line manager can be surprisingly beneficial, and how it may be possible to capture a lot of those benefits by just having pairs of junior people who want more line management act as each other’s line managers.
Michelle Hutchinson replied:
This sounds great to me! I’d be tempted to try out things in existing infrastructure first, like trying it out in the careers discussion fbook group, or the open thread you mentioned.
Other options that come to mind:
Look at the EA London community directory for people who would likely have relevant comments on your plan and reach out to them. This seems like it might be more likely to get a reply than a general call, and the person might have more relevant comments than a random person would. But they would likely have less time because they’re not selected by being keen to look over a career plan.
Talking to other EAs at your local meet up about looking through your plan, or if there isn’t a group in your area joining EA Anywhere
I’ve been surprised how much people’s preferences on how to give comments on career plans differs. For example, I find it takes me ages to read through a plan so I end up putting it off for ages. Whereas I really like talking to people, so I’m much happier to chat to someone for half an hour. By contrast a friend of mine finds answering questions on the spot really stressful, so far prefers reading over things. So it seems worth giving people an option about whether to read through something (and if so how much) or whether to chat.
In the longer run, I think it would be cool to have a facebook group or slack for EA job seekers to keep each other motivated and accountable, because it’s so hard to apply for jobs and deal with the uncertainty. That might also be a good place for people sharing and commenting on career plans.
I like all of Michelle’s suggestions. And Discord sounds like it could work too, though I haven’t tried the platform at all myself. I think it’s very possible that one of these ideas other than an EA Forum open thread would be better, or should be used as well. But I figured I may as well experiment with this open thread first.
The promised additional, less important info on why I’m making this thread and how I suggest people use it
(I’ll split this info into different replies to this one comment.)
I highly recommend the post Asking for advice; I think people who want to get feedback on their career plans via this thread could gain by reading that. I also recommend the post Giving and receiving advice.
Here’s more of what the particularly relevant section of 80,000 Hours’ article on How to plan your career says:
On a similar note, I think it’d be really cool if this open thread led to people finding “career-planning partners”. (See also Rob Wiblin’s comments about how having a line manager can be surprisingly beneficial, and how it may be possible to capture a lot of those benefits by just having pairs of junior people who want more line management act as each other’s line managers.)
I expect a lot of people would benefit from going through 80,000 Hours career planning article and/or the accompanying worksheet.
I think this applies especially to people who haven’t yet spent a huge amount of time on career planning or reading articles from 80,000 Hours. But I worked through the article and worksheet recently and found it helpful, despite already having spent a lot of time on career planning, as well as having (I think) read almost all of 80,000 Hours main articles and many of the more blog-post-y ones too.
The trigger for me to make this open thread post was this comment thread. As I wrote there:
Michelle Hutchinson replied:
And the user gkaufman27@gmail.com suggested a Discord server.
I like all of Michelle’s suggestions. And Discord sounds like it could work too, though I haven’t tried the platform at all myself. I think it’s very possible that one of these ideas other than an EA Forum open thread would be better, or should be used as well. But I figured I may as well experiment with this open thread first.
EA Global Reconnect will probably have a slack/discord. That might be a convenient place to try out chat format