New releases

Giving What We Can is our sister organisation, and we are cross posting this job opportunity from their blog:

In just five years, Giving What We Can has grown to over 660 members in 25 countries worldwide. The community has pledged over $330m towards ending poverty. We are looking for additional hires to build on this success.

Apply to be our Director of Research

Note: applications have now closed.

The deadline for submitting applications is now Midnight GMT on Friday 12th December 2014.

As Director of Research, you would lead our efforts to find the charities most effective at alleviating extreme poverty and advise the Giving What We Can community in their donation decisions.

Specifically, you would be responsible for:

• Determining which charities we should recommend – based both the effectiveness of the interventions the charities carry out, and how well those organisations implement them.
• Understanding the broader landscape of top charitable interventions and organisations, in order to advise our members when deciding where to donate
• Presenting the research in compelling ways in order to encourage people to donate to the most effective charities, both via our website and presentations.

We are a small team, so you’ll also have the opportunity to be involved in recruitment, fundraising, publishing our findings in the media, and whatever else most interests you.

Why work at Giving What We Can

• Be at the heart of an inspiring community of people who care about others and really put their passion into practice:
  We have members all around the world,

Many people have told us that if you want to work in international development, it’s very useful to spend time working in a developing country (e.g. see our interview with Owen Barder), and living abroad is probably useful for exploration value too. It’s also very useful to get project management experience early on in this space, because it opens up jobs in non-profits and foundations. But management positions in the developing world are rare early in your career.

This made me interested to hear about 2Seeds, which gives graduates the opportunity to volunteer as a project manager in rural Tanazania for a year.

I met the co-founder of 2Seeds, Sam Bonsey, at a conference, and then followed up by doing the following interview with their Outreach Manager, Abby Love. Based on what I’ve seen, it looks well worth considering as an early career step, especially if you’re interested in working within international development.

Read on to see the full interview, which was conducted by email.

As Head of Research, you will become part of our founding team to lead our research efforts into how to select the most high-impact careers. Our research is what drives the advice we provide via our website and career coaching.

Specifically, you become responsible for:

• Deciding what questions to investigate and personally coming up with answers to these questions, or overseeing the delegation of this research to others.
• Helping to translate these findings into practical products that help people make better decisions – books, web applications, workshops and others.
• Fitting the research into the overall strategy for the organisation.

We are a small team, so you’ll also have the opportunity to be involved in recruitment, fundraising, publishing our findings in the media and whatever else most interests you.

We are recruiting a Chief Operating Officer to lead our central division, managing a team that supports the recruitment, finance, logistics, HR and fundraising of all our projects. This role is a unique opportunity to shape a rapidly-growing charity into an incubator that can quickly scale up the best ideas emerging from the nascent effective altruism movement. We see this as one of the most challenging roles in the organisation, requiring a high level of competency across most skill areas. The role is located in Oxford, and you would work in our offices which are housed within the University.

The Centre for Effective Altruism is an incubator of projects we believe have potential to create significant positive change in the world at low cost. Our organisation includes two established projects, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, as well as two newer projects we are incubating, the Global Priorities Project and Effective Altruism Outreach. We have also spun two projects out of the Centre for Effective Altruism – Animal Charity Evaluators and The Life You Can Save – which are both now run independently in the US.

In this role you would be involved in the operational aspects of all of CEA’s projects. You will meet and provide invaluable help to a large share of the people and projects in the effective altruist movement today. You will learn about all aspects of CEA’s work, including our expansion into other countries. As a result, it will provide you with the skills and contacts you would need to lead on future projects.

Keeping options open is important for everyone, it’s especially important if you want to make a difference, because the most effective career opportunities are likely to change in the future. Indeed, we think it’s usually more important to keep your options open to make an immediate impact.

Many people think that ‘keeping your options open’ means being non-committal and avoiding tough decisions. We disagree. The best to keep your options open is to commit to building flexible abilities and resources, such as transferable skills, money and a public platform.

For more, see our new page on the topic.

We recently released a page on “top career strategies”, featuring two strategies for building your long-run potential, and five for immediate impact:

1. The experimenter: Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills.
2. The self-developer: When you’ve narrowed down which area you want to enter, focus on investing in yourself to build your career capital.
3. The effective worker: There are many non-profit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organization, it’s an option worth considering. By high-impact organisations we mean those that are well-run and work on an effective cause.
4. The entrepreneur: If you’ve got potential as an entrepreneur, attempt to found new effective non-profit organisations or innovative for-profits that benefit their customers and create positive spill-over effects.
5. The philanthropist: Some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than the other strategies. These people can take a higher-earning career and donate the money to effective organisations. We call this strategy ‘earning to give’.
6. The researcher: Some people are especially good at and interested in research – attempting to create new knowledge. If this is you, and have you have the opportunity to work in a field that seems particularly important, tractable and neglected, then this could be a way to have a large impact.
7. The advocate: If you can take a job that gives you a public platform, good network and credibility, you can use it to promote and unite people behind important ideas.

A few weeks ago, a new online forum to discuss effective altruism was released.

So far, the quality of the discussion has been great. If you’re interested in what we discuss on 80,000 Hours, you should definitely check it out. It may also be a good place to field career-related questions – we’re on there often.

If you’ve got experience with a career of interest to our readers, we’d like to feature an interview with your on our blog. Similarly, if you’re interviewing someone as part of your career research, we’d like to feature your notes. For instance, see this interview with Buck from App Academy – one of our most popular ever pieces of content – and see many more here.

Why are we looking for interviews?

We think our readers have lots of useful knowledge to share about their careers, and we’ve found interviews to be one of the quickest, most transparent ways to do it.

How would we like to do the interview?

If you’re interested, choose 5-10 questions, draft answers to them, and send them to [email protected]. I’ll ask some follow up questions, then we’ll publish the final result on the blog.

If you’re interviewing someone else, make sure to get their permission to post the notes.

Example questions

Some good general purpose questions are:

• What did you do before this job?
• Why did you take this job?
• What does the job involve?
• What are the main pros and cons of this job for someone looking to make a difference?
• What are the best sources of further information on this area?

You can see a full list of ideas for questions we often use here.

If you’ve made a career decision recently, we’d like to feature your story on the blog. Here’s some examples: Peter, Jess, Alexei.

If you’re interested, please email [email protected].