Goals
- Help fill career advising gaps in the EA community
- Improve coordination, collaboration and knowledge sharing amongst group organisers
- Produce meta-research on careers advice by experimenting with new projects and refining old ones
- Strengthen local groups and the global EA movement. Currently, the lack of effective opportunities and guidance make member retention and engagement more difficult overall, as it sidelines members who are currently unable to directly contribute to prioritised paths.
Improve the impact of location-constrained or early-stage promising EAs.
Location constraint is a widespread issue observed by group organisers because family, visa limitations, English fluency, or personal preference.
Demand for career support
We identified a demand for career support and guidance services from both group organisers via survey for their members, and from EAs themselves in the process of a career change via in-depth qualitative interviews. There is a demonstrated demand for greater collaboration amongst group organisers and for career advice services in particular.
- From the 2019 group organisers’ survey:
- One of the main focuses for a majority of local groups is providing information on effective career options
- When asked about other services or support they would like to see, over 60% of group organisers ranked personal feedback and support at a 4 or 5 for service they would like to see.
- There is also demand for both career coaching services, and more collaboration amongst group organisers as “the most common suggestion was external coaching, followed by greater local organizer collaboration.
- With regards to coaching, organizers sought a personal contact that could offer mentoring, accountability, career coaching, how to conduct shallow research, how to run events, impact evaluation, and recruitment.” (emphasis added).
- The local career advice network to date has a working group of ~10 active members from different groups, a mailing list of over 60 interested organisers. I have presented our research and work at the EAANZ group leaders’ retreat to about 10 local organisers, where it was well-received.
- According to our career advice bottlenecks survey, of the organisers who said they prioritise careers advice a little or do not prioritise it at all, over 50% cited that they do not feel qualified or knowledgeable enough to give careers advice.
- It is difficult to quantify the precise value of providing collaborative support, since many of the services I offer are hard to track or concretely measure, but I estimate I could save 1 hour for every 5 current hours spent on career advice research by group organisers by offering the group organiser services. I also expect this work to save organisers in the future significantly more time, maybe up to 2-3 hours for every 5 hours they spend on research, as I aim to build upon previous research.
Career advice bottlenecks survey results
This survey was completed by 27 group organisers (⅓ city, national and student) primarily from Europe and Asia Pacific and asked them questions about their members’ bottlenecks and their own challenges giving careers advice. The preliminary analysis of the survey has been completed, and the write-up will be shared in the coming weeks.
The highest ranked bottlenecks were personal and path uncertainty. The top reasons for uncertainty were: a lack of confidence, a lack of ambition and a lack of path-specific knowledge. I believe it is tractable to address a lack of confidence and path-specific knowledge via the bootcamp.
A lack of local jobs and freedom of movement were the next highest ranked bottlenecks. I estimate we could help at least 50-70% of people in this category, who are willing to follow EA-aligned paths and move if necessary but are unable to.
Innate talent was one of the least prevalent bottlenecks. Other relevant bottlenecks which were more prevalent and co-occur - like credentials, experience and skills. It seems that these are structural concerns and are affected by connections, access to opportunities to build career capital locally and challenges signalling credentials.
Qualitative interviews with career changers
I conducted a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 EAs last summer. From this research with EAs who were very committed to EA but struggling with their transitions and often isolated from the local community, we identified the need to provide consistent support, connections and guidance for these individuals. We also hypothesized that such services could help an individual reduce the length of their career transition. From our bottlenecks survey, only a few group organisers mentioned events that provided these kinds of services.
Who ran the project?
Vaidehi Agarwalla founded and ran the Local Career Advice Network since October 2019, with Cristina Schmidt Ibáñez and a group of other country organiseres. At the time, Vaidehi was an EA Singapore and Effective Environmentalism organiser. She’d previously conducted qualitative interviews with career changers, created practical and strategic group building resources for the EA Hub, and developed a sociological model of EA movement building. You can read the full list of her past projects here.
Archive