Often what the people we advise find most helpful [after having completed most of the recommended career planning process] is to show their plan to others — other people can help spot assumptions you’re making that may seem obvious to you but really aren’t.
One exercise is to make a copy of your worksheet and send it to a couple of friends or advisors for comments.
Many people in EA aren’t able to get as much career advice as they’d like, while at the same time, hundreds of EAs are happy to provide informal advice and mentoring within their career area.
Much of what we do in our one-on-one advice at 80,000 Hours is try to connect these two groups, but we’re not able to cover a significant number of people. At the same time, spaces like the EA careers discussion FB group don’t seem to have taken off as a place where people get concrete advice.
As an experiment, I thought we could try having an open career questions thread on the Forum.
So I’m setting up this open thread as a somewhat similar experiment:
If you’ve written something up about your career plan and would be keen for feedback from members of the EA community, please feel encouraged to comment here with a link to what you’ve written, or just a way to contact you if you’d prefer to share the link via private message or email.
It’d probably be best to also say a few words/sentences about the sort of pathways you’re considering, the sort of people who you’d most like feedback from, or similar.
If you’d be happy to provide feedback on other people’s career plans, please feel encouraged to leave a comment saying so (and ideally also saying something about your areas of interest or expertise), and/or to look at other people’s comments requesting feedback.
Also consider both requesting and providing feedback!
Also feel free to propose instead using voice messages or video calls to explain your career plan, get feedback, or give feedback, if you’d find that easier or preferable.
It’s totally ok if your plan or write-up is very rough, if you’re relatively new to EA, if you care a lot about things other than impartial altruism, if you’re not sure how useful your feedback to others would be, etc.
To get things going, I commit to reading and providing some feedback on at least 2 pages’ worth of the documents from each of the first 5 people who comment to request feedback. (I might end up providing more feedback than that; I’ll just see how long this takes me.)
In a comment below, I’ll add some additional, less important info on why I’m making this thread and how I suggest people use it.
Just please bear in mind this will all be public on the internet for the long term. Don’t post things you wouldn’t want future employers to see, unless using an anonymous account. Even being frank about the pros and cons of different jobs can easily look bad.
(So you could consider doing things like sharing a link to a google doc that people have to request access to before seeing, or just saying the doc exists and asking people to send a message in order to be sent a copy/link.)
Please note that I’m not in any way affiliated with 80,000 Hours; the reason I quote them a lot is just that I like their work.
Open thread: Get/give feedback on career plans
Near the end of their article on How to plan your career, 80,000 Hours write:
More recently, Ben Todd of 80,000 Hours made a Careers Questions Open Thread, writing:
So I’m setting up this open thread as a somewhat similar experiment:
If you’ve written something up about your career plan and would be keen for feedback from members of the EA community, please feel encouraged to comment here with a link to what you’ve written, or just a way to contact you if you’d prefer to share the link via private message or email.
It’d probably be best to also say a few words/sentences about the sort of pathways you’re considering, the sort of people who you’d most like feedback from, or similar.
Your writeup could be of any length, level of polish, and format, from very rough notes to a fully filled-in version of the 80,000 Hours career planning worksheet.
If you’d be happy to provide feedback on other people’s career plans, please feel encouraged to leave a comment saying so (and ideally also saying something about your areas of interest or expertise), and/or to look at other people’s comments requesting feedback.
Also consider both requesting and providing feedback!
Also feel free to propose instead using voice messages or video calls to explain your career plan, get feedback, or give feedback, if you’d find that easier or preferable.
It’s totally ok if your plan or write-up is very rough, if you’re relatively new to EA, if you care a lot about things other than impartial altruism, if you’re not sure how useful your feedback to others would be, etc.
To get things going, I commit to reading and providing some feedback on at least 2 pages’ worth of the documents from each of the first 5 people who comment to request feedback. (I might end up providing more feedback than that; I’ll just see how long this takes me.)
In a comment below, I’ll add some additional, less important info on why I’m making this thread and how I suggest people use it.
Finally, as Ben Todd notes in Careers Questions Open Thread:
(So you could consider doing things like sharing a link to a google doc that people have to request access to before seeing, or just saying the doc exists and asking people to send a message in order to be sent a copy/link.)
Please note that I’m not in any way affiliated with 80,000 Hours; the reason I quote them a lot is just that I like their work.