Open for comment: EA career changer worksheet
Link to Google Docs worksheet (open for comments)
As per title, I’m working on a worksheet for EA career changers. The goals are to help individuals better manage their deliberation process, and to provide structure for productive community networking among career changers. Right now, I have a number of concerns:
Is it too complicated?
Missing important questions?
It’s untested.
Is it an inferior version of another questionnaire?
It’s meant to stimulate public discussion yet asks about private information.
It may result in a giant text blob that becomes hard for the user to process.
Could it be more specific to EA?
I originally meant to create a checklist, but don’t see a way to do that right now in a way that preserves the general applicability of the device. If you have thoughts on any of these questions, please comment below or in the doc!
I left some comments on the document. Thanks for producing and sharing it!
It seems as though, by “questionnaire”, you mean something more like “individual worksheet someone can use to think through a career change”. Based on your first post, I had been thinking of it as a survey/”invitation to share your story”. My initial suggestions sometimes treated the document as a potential survey.
As a general piece of advice, think carefully about every question to make sure it pulls its weight; I think you’re currently on the side of “trying to do too much”, and that you could help people get almost as much insight into themselves with many fewer questions. Especially watch out for questions that will have somewhat redundant answers, like “what standard of living is acceptable?” and “can you downsize to save money?”.
Also, just read through your extensive and thoughtful comments—thank you for that. As you noted, this was more a worksheet than a survey, and I’ll try to keep a clearer distinction between those two projects.
Thanks, good insights. I was imagining a way to help individuals think through their personal situation in a more in-depth way (the worksheet linked here), and a set of interview questions to spark conversation (my last post). I’ll give that some thought.
Seeking EAs to Interview on Career Change Resources
Hi everyone! Vaidehi Agarwalla and I (Benjamin Skubi), are collaborating on a project to develop career resources for the EA movement. We believe that a pressing issue is enhancing the resources for people newer to the movement and in the earlier stages of a career change. Existing EA resources focus on job placement for already-qualified individuals, and on broadcasting the results of cause prioritization research. While these are extremely useful projects, the movement as a whole struggles in some regards with coordination of other efforts, providing user-friendly and up-to-date resources, and integrating interested people into pre-existing communities. For many people whose involvement with EA might be mutually beneficial to them, the movement, and the world, the challenge of making sense of all the information (if there are relevant resources) may be a significant barrier to taking the next step.
Our plan is to conduct exploratory (video) interviews, lasting perhaps 30-40 minutes, with EAs who are in the early stages of exploring a career change. We hope that we can benefit interviewees by helping connect them with relevant people and resources, and better understand the challenges they face.
If you would like to be interviewed, please fill out our contact form. We hope to interview as many people as possible, although we will begin with only a few interviews for the initial round. We will also be providing updates as the project advances. We look forward to hearing from you!