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Common mistakes in careers advice: when should you trust sayings?

Blog post by · Published February 10th, 2013

“Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves.”

Often in careers advice, as in life generally, you will be handed some proverb. But sometimes these sayings aren’t true, how can you know when to trust them? A common mistake in career choice is to blindly accept common ideas like this without good reason.

You can’t always rely on hard studies being available, you have to rely on your intuitions a lot of the time. One way of using your intuition better that I’ve found effective is to follow this plan:

  • Reverse the principle and see if the opposite idea makes sense
  • Tell two stories, one to explain the principle, one to explain the reverse.
  • Use these stories to find out when to trust the principle.

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    The best resources for planning your career

    Blog post by · Published February 6th, 2013

    When you’re choosing between career options you need detailed information on different aspects of your career so you can evaluate potential impact, work out what skills are needed, and see whether you’d like to pursue that career. Unfortunately much of the information you need doesn’t exist. For instance, you can easily find minimum entry requirements for different roles, but there’s isn’t much on how to judge your chances of being successful once you’ve got the job. Some important information does exist, such as evidence-based ways to judge whether you’ll enjoy a particular job, but it isn’t covered by conventional careers advice. And it’s difficult to find any information at all about more entrepreneurial paths.

    On the other hand, the existing resources are great for certain types of information. Governments collect detailed information on types of roles, what they involve, what skills and qualifications are required, basic salary data and industry trends. There are also some private providers of career information and advice, including advice on how to get into certain types of jobs.

    We’re going to prepare career profiles on specific careers that will help you work out whether to pursue that option . But in the meantime, here’s our first thoughts on the best resources that are already out there.

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    Vegetarian Research

    Blog post by · Published February 3rd, 2013

    For-profit companies (including the meat, egg, and dairy industries) spend countless
    dollars each year on market research to figure out the best ways to persuade
    the public to consume their products. Vegetarian advocacy organizations have
    until recently spent virtually nothing to determine the best ways to persuade the
    public, despite the fact that their entire success as a movement depends on getting
    individual members of the public to change their dietary behavior. Until things
    began to change this past year, there had been virtually no research on the impact of
    various programs (i.e., no formal comparing of veg advocacy programs against one
    another to determine which are most cost-effective), and also no component testing
    of specific aspects of a program (for example, does video A or video B persuade
    more people to go vegetarian?).

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    Encourage discussion, not defensiveness

    Blog post by · Published January 31st, 2013

    Rather than encouraging constructive discussion, presenting new ideas – especially about moral issues – can often spark confrontation. Why is it so hard to communicate new or controversial ideas? How can you improve the way you frame your case to encourage discussion, not defensiveness?

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      Career Advice for High-Impact Activism

      Blog post by · Published January 29th, 2013

      Nick Cooney is the Founder and Director of The Humane League –
      [Effective Animal Activism’s](http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/Top-
      charities) top recommended charity – and the Compassionate Communitites
      Manager at Farm Sanctuary. He’s also the author of [Change of Heart](http://
      www.veganoutreach.org/advocacy/cooneyontitles.html), which is about how we
      can use an understanding of psychology to make social advocacy more effective
      (we recommend it!). As a member of 80,000 Hours, we asked him to share his thoughts on how to create
      impact with your career.

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      10 steps to choosing your degree

      Blog post by · Published January 23rd, 2013

      I talked earlier about how at university you should probably pick more mathematical ‘hard’ subjects over more artsy ones and focus on getting a good degree class. This is pretty similar to conventional advice on choosing a degree. But I found a lack of practical step-by-step guides to picking the right degree for you. This guide gives you a structured way to gather all the relevant information and to make a decision on your degree. Without a structured process it’s easy to narrow down your options too fast, to ignore important evidence, and to apply your evidence inconsistently.

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      How to choose a degree – what do employers want?

      Blog post by · Published January 20th, 2013

      In my last post I looked at the role of degree choice for professional and academic careers. Now let’s branch out and look at the more general role of degree choice. This matters for people interested in Advocacy, Innovation, Improving as well as Earning to Give in non-professional careers. At this stage in our research, it seems that degrees in more quantitative subjects improve your employment prospects and your flexibility, which is important for making a difference. The next most important thing is to pick a degree you expect to do well in. But, again, we’ll be refining that view as we explore more of the evidence.

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      How to choose a degree for Earning to Give and Research

      Blog post by · Published January 18th, 2013

      One of the most important early career decisions many people face is what to study at university. This is the first of a series of posts on degree choice intended for people who mean to go to university. Degree choice plays an important role in your ability to make a difference later in life. People probably don’t put enough effort into systematically thinking about degree choice. In this post I’ll look at the importance of degree choice for professional careers and academic careers. In the next post I look at the importance for general career choice.

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      Are you cheating career choice?

      Blog post by · Published January 2nd, 2013

      Often when faced with a really difficult question, people “cheat” by opting to answer an easier but related one, without realising they’re doing it. Sometimes this is a helpful tactic, but it can be a huge source of error. Could you be doing this with your career decisions?

      People often end up cheating and answering an easier question because the real question is so complex that they don’t even know how to go about answering it. What we’re aiming to do is provide you with the tools and guidance you need to answer the questions “Which career is right for me?” and “How can I make a difference in my career?”, so that you don’t need to cheat.

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      The power of effective activism

      Blog post by · Published December 23rd, 2012

      The power of persuasion for making a difference is often underappreciated. If you can convince just one other person to care about a cause as much as you, then you’ve easily doubled your impact. But people’s efforts at influencing others often aren’t as efficient as they could be. By stepping outside your circle of personal contacts and choosing a strategic approach, your time and influence can go ten or even a hundred times further.

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      Our research on how to find a job you love

      Blog post by · Published December 18th, 2012

      Note: this post has been superseded by our job satisfaction page and supporting research page.

      Many people aren’t as satisfied as they could be with their careers. This is a big problem: not only is the person less happy, they also end up making less difference in society. The even bigger problem is that people don’t seem to know what to do about this – how to find a job that they’ll find satisfying. There’s a lot of psychology research on happiness that could be really useful, but people don’t seem to be aware of it or at least aren’t applying it. So we decided to start collecting together the research that seems most useful to job satisfaction, and explaining how it applies to your career decisions.

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      How to judge your chances of success

      Blog post by · Published December 16th, 2012

      You want to make a difference. This means being as successful as possible in whatever high-impact path you pursue. In recent posts, I raised a worry that we might overestimate our chances of success. But at the same time we don’t want to underestimate them: something we do have reason to think we’re better than average at something.

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      3 Ways to Advance Science

      Blog post by · Published December 15th, 2012

      There are three ways to contribute to scientific progress. The direct way is to conduct a good scientific study and publish the results. The indirect way is to help others make a direct contribution. Journal editors, university administrators and philanthropists who fund research contribute to scientific progress in this second way. A third approach is to marry the first two and make a scientific advance that itself expedites scientific advances. The full significance of this third way is commonly overlooked.

      Formula

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      Christmas gifts, goats and cash-transfer charities

      Blog post by · Published December 12th, 2012

      It’s getting closer to Christmas, and we’re running out of time to get presents for friends and family. It can be hard to work out what presents people will actually enjoy. An increasingly popular option is to make a donation on behalf of someone else as a present. What’s the best way to do that? Does it involve goats? You might be interested in Giving What We Can’s gift cards that let you donate to the world’s most effective charities .

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