MichaelA🔸 comments on Open thread: Get/​give feedback on career plans

[MichaelA🔸]

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.)