I recently learned about Training for Good, a Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated project, which seems to address some of these problems. They might be worth checking out.
I think this is a great exercise to think about, especially in light of somewhat-recent discussion on how competitive jobs at EA orgs are. There seems to be plenty of room for more people working on EA projects, and I agree that it’s probably good to fill that opportunity. Some loose thoughts:
There seem to be two basic ways of getting skilled people working on EA cause areas: 1. Selectively recruiting people who already have skills. 2. Recruiting promising people who might not yet have needed skills and train them.
Individual organizations can choose both options, depending on their level of resources. But if most organizations choose option 1, the EA community might be underutilizing its potential pool of human resources. So we might want the community in general to use option 2, so that everyone who wants to be involved with EA can have a role—even if individual EA organizations still choose option 1. For this to happen, the EA community would probably need a program whereby motivated people can choose a skillset to learn, are taught that skillset, and are matched with a job at the end of the process.
Currently, motivated people who don’t yet possess skills are placed into a jumble of 1-on-1 conversations, 80k advising calls, and fellowship and internship listings. Having those calls and filling out internship and fellowship applications takes a ton of time and mental energy, and might leave people more confused than they were initially. A well-run training program could eliminate many of these inefficiencies and reduce the risk that interested people won’t be able to find a job in EA.
We can roughly rank skill-building methods by the number of people they reach (“scale”), and the depth of training that they provide. In the list below, “high depth” skill development could lead to being hired for that skill (when one would not have been hired for that skill otherwise), “medium depth” as warranting a promotion or increase in seniority level, and “low depth” as an enhancement of knowledge that can help someone perform their job better, but probably won’t lead to new positions or higher status.
Internal development within organizations, like Aaron Gertler mentioned (small scale, medium depth)
Internship/fellowship programs (medium scale, medium depth)
One-off workshops and lectures (small scale, low depth)
A training program like the one I described above (large scale, high depth)
An EA university, as proposed here (large scale, high depth)
If we choose option 2, we probably want large scale, high depth ways to train people. I’m interested in hearing people’s thoughts on whether this is a good way to evaluate skill-building methods.
One caveat: there’s a lot more interest in working for the military than there is in working for EA orgs. Since this interest already exists, the military just needs to capitalize on it (although they still spend lots of money on recruitment ads and programs like ROTC). The EA community doesn’t even have great name recognition, so it’s probably premature to assume that we’d have waves of people signing up for such a training program—but it’s possible that we could get to that point with time.
I recently learned about Training for Good, a Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated project, which seems to address some of these problems. They might be worth checking out.
I think this is a great exercise to think about, especially in light of somewhat-recent discussion on how competitive jobs at EA orgs are. There seems to be plenty of room for more people working on EA projects, and I agree that it’s probably good to fill that opportunity. Some loose thoughts:
There seem to be two basic ways of getting skilled people working on EA cause areas:
1. Selectively recruiting people who already have skills.
2. Recruiting promising people who might not yet have needed skills and train them.
Individual organizations can choose both options, depending on their level of resources. But if most organizations choose option 1, the EA community might be underutilizing its potential pool of human resources. So we might want the community in general to use option 2, so that everyone who wants to be involved with EA can have a role—even if individual EA organizations still choose option 1. For this to happen, the EA community would probably need a program whereby motivated people can choose a skillset to learn, are taught that skillset, and are matched with a job at the end of the process.
Currently, motivated people who don’t yet possess skills are placed into a jumble of 1-on-1 conversations, 80k advising calls, and fellowship and internship listings. Having those calls and filling out internship and fellowship applications takes a ton of time and mental energy, and might leave people more confused than they were initially. A well-run training program could eliminate many of these inefficiencies and reduce the risk that interested people won’t be able to find a job in EA.
We can roughly rank skill-building methods by the number of people they reach (“scale”), and the depth of training that they provide. In the list below, “high depth” skill development could lead to being hired for that skill (when one would not have been hired for that skill otherwise), “medium depth” as warranting a promotion or increase in seniority level, and “low depth” as an enhancement of knowledge that can help someone perform their job better, but probably won’t lead to new positions or higher status.
Internal development within organizations, like Aaron Gertler mentioned (small scale, medium depth)
Internship/fellowship programs (medium scale, medium depth)
One-off workshops and lectures (small scale, low depth)
Cause area-specific fellowships, like EA Cambridge’s AGI Safety Fellowship (large scale, low depth)
A training program like the one I described above (large scale, high depth)
An EA university, as proposed here (large scale, high depth)
If we choose option 2, we probably want large scale, high depth ways to train people. I’m interested in hearing people’s thoughts on whether this is a good way to evaluate skill-building methods.
One caveat: there’s a lot more interest in working for the military than there is in working for EA orgs. Since this interest already exists, the military just needs to capitalize on it (although they still spend lots of money on recruitment ads and programs like ROTC). The EA community doesn’t even have great name recognition, so it’s probably premature to assume that we’d have waves of people signing up for such a training program—but it’s possible that we could get to that point with time.