This is helpful, but there is a key difference between the EA job market and the general one: there are a limited number of positions in EA. I think a valuable metric that perhaps could be explored on the next EA survey is the level of EA “unemployment.” This could mean the number of EAs who would prefer to have a job at an EA aligned organization, but have not gotten one. I suspect this will be far higher than the general level of unemployment. As an example, say there are 50 EAs with a particular skill, and five EA jobs requiring that skill. Then if they all apply to those five jobs, 2% of the applicants will get a job in each case, but that is only 10% of the EAs getting a job, so there would be 90% “unemployment.” Whereas outside of EA, they could all apply to 50 jobs and all get jobs. This could be analogous to underemployment, such as PhDs who want a job such as academia that requires a PhD, but have not gotten one.
At least in theory we could track EA job Openings, Hires, Quits and Layoffs, similar to the JOLTS data. This has the advantage of not needing to estimate the denominator of ‘total EA labour force’. In practice this is probably not worth the effort of collecting though.
This is helpful, but there is a key difference between the EA job market and the general one: there are a limited number of positions in EA. I think a valuable metric that perhaps could be explored on the next EA survey is the level of EA “unemployment.” This could mean the number of EAs who would prefer to have a job at an EA aligned organization, but have not gotten one. I suspect this will be far higher than the general level of unemployment. As an example, say there are 50 EAs with a particular skill, and five EA jobs requiring that skill. Then if they all apply to those five jobs, 2% of the applicants will get a job in each case, but that is only 10% of the EAs getting a job, so there would be 90% “unemployment.” Whereas outside of EA, they could all apply to 50 jobs and all get jobs. This could be analogous to underemployment, such as PhDs who want a job such as academia that requires a PhD, but have not gotten one.
At least in theory we could track EA job Openings, Hires, Quits and Layoffs, similar to the JOLTS data. This has the advantage of not needing to estimate the denominator of ‘total EA labour force’. In practice this is probably not worth the effort of collecting though.