While investigating how to give good careers advice, we asked ourselves whether the Myers Briggs test, the world’s most widely used personality test, might be useful. We’ve concluded that it probably isn’t.
Drawing on similarities between an individual planning their career and a startup business, we’ve realised the importance of learning and adapting to change early in your career. Rigid career plans don’t seem that useful, and could even be harmful – but you do still need some means of direction and motivation for the future.
One promising solution we’ve found is the idea of having a “career model”: identifying your aims and values, and making a best guess of how you might achieve them. What’s key is that this model is designed to be tested and adapted as you learn.
Hopefully you’ve seen by now that 80,000 Hours is hiring!
In addition to the positions advertised previously, we’re also looking for a Finance Manager and Director of Fundraising. Both would be full-time paid positions based in Oxford, and you’d be working across both 80,000 Hours and our sister organisation Giving What We Can.
The deadline for all positions is Friday 16th August at 5pm GMT.
Does Earning to Give do more harm than good?
It is often claimed that philanthropists do more harm earning money than good making donations. We saw this idea raised many times during the recent press coverage of Earning to Give. Our response is that although the objection may be true for typical examples of philanthropy, when donors are giving effectively it’s difficult for the expected harm to outweigh the good done by the donations.
In this post, I make some very rough estimates of how harmful finance would have to be in order for it to outweigh the good done by the donations of someone Earning to Give to effective charities.
How do you even begin going about trying to assess the impact of a career?
It might seem impossible. But if you don’t try to weigh up your options, you’ll end up doing far less for the world than you could otherwise.
It’s not an easy question, but it is a fascinating one that has a great deal of importance for the world. After talking one-on-one with around 100 people about their careers, asking people who have made a big impact, and thinking through what matters, we’ve developed an initial simple framework for assessing the value of different careers.
We think that we can draw many useful insights about career planning from thinking about how startups operate successfully. There seem to be a lot of direct analogies between startup strategy and career planning: both mean finding a niche where you can excel and beat the competition, and both require doing so in a highly uncertain and changing environment.
So what can we learn about career planning from startup strategy?
We want to change the world by revolutionising something incredibly important: the way people think about and spend their careers. Our mission is to help talented and dedicated people have the biggest possible positive impact with their careers. This is a big project, and we’re growing fast, so we’re looking for bright and ambitious people to join us. If this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, then apply to work for us!
We recently interviewed Roland Mathiasson, vice president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC), a leading global think tank which draws together over 100 top economists to work on prioritizing the solutions to the most pressing global issues. The Center’s leader, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine and has been repeatedly named one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy. We initiated the interview after being contacted by Roland about a job opportunity with CCC…
We recently secured funding for a Research Collaboration with Amlin Insurance focusing on systemic risks associated with risk modelling. This is a unique opportunity to build a world-leading research programme. We’re looking for someone who can not only manage this project, but who also has the drive and initiative to find new sources of funding, network with leading experts, and design future plans for the project. We’re also looking for someone who understands and is motivated by the aims of the FHI; the post-holder will have the opportunity to contribute across the board to FHI projects, and may be a crucial part of the FHI’s success going forward.
It’s a two year position, but there will be the possibility of extension depending on the success of the project and the acquisition of further funding. All the details can be found here
Why do so many elite graduates go into finance and consulting? At Princeton, for example, more than 30% enter finance alone.
The Aspen Impact Careers recently conducted research that attempted to work out why so many elite graduates enter finance and consulting (unpublished). They found several important factors, which chime with the explanations proposed by commentators in the media. But they proposed that the single biggest factor was a desire to keep options open. Entry level consulting and finance jobs successfully market themselves as a great general purpose training and a ticket to all sorts of other jobs in the future. The same is true of Teach for America. The demand is real, and all three have been rewarded with strong applications.
From an entirely personal point of view, it makes sense to prioritise keeping your options open in the first couple of years of your career. You have little idea what you’ll enjoy or be good at when you start working, or what opportunities will come your way in the future. A good way to deal with the problem is to take the job that most keeps your options open. That way you can learn more about what you enjoy, but retain the ability to switch into another job if it turns out you don’t enjoy your first one.
We’re changing how we do our career coaching. For at least the next couple of months, we’re only going to be coaching one or two people each week, but we’re going to spend up to a week of research on each one. We call these our case studies.
Why the change? Why are we going to turn away at least 80% of our coaching requests? This post explains how and why our new approach will be more in depth.
Effective Animal Activism (EAA) will now become entirely independent from 80,000 Hours, and has a separate board of trustees consisting of Brian Tomasik, Eitan Fischer and Rob Wiblin.
In the rest of this post, I let Jon explain the new mission and direction of the organisation.
Want a systematic approach to getting your dream job, whether for earning to give or for working at one of the top organizations? Read this guest post from a Google employee, Alexei Andreev, on how he got his job and how you can do the same.
Want to really add value and innovate in international development? AidGrade, a fantastic new organisation with precisely this aim, are currently hiring.
If making a huge difference using your quantitative skills sounds like something you’re interested in, read on for a full description from Eva of what AidGrade are looking for and offer.
I recently interviewed Eva Vivalt, who works for the World Bank and is the founder of AidGrade, a new organisation that evaluates and recommends different development programs on the basis of effectiveness. AidGrade’s mission is “to improve the effectiveness of development efforts by understanding and encouraging what works using rigorous, actionable and engaging evidence.” You can find out more about AidGrade on their website here.
Since one way that you can have a big impact with your career is through earning to give, we want to investigate which careers hold the best earnings prospects.
Our most recent research looked at the typical career paths and salaries for five different careers: Accounting, Consulting, Investment Banking, Law and Medicine. We found that investment bankers have the highest earning potential and in the UK: they can expect to earn between £8m and £40m over the course of their career.
A common misconception is that 80,000 Hours thinks Earning to Give is typically the way to have the most impact with your career. We’ve never said that in any of our materials. All we have said, for instance in the paper we published on Earning to Give, is that there is strong reason to think that Earning to Give is better than taking a typical nonprofit job.
When it comes to how to make the most difference with your career, we think there’s huge room for debate. Whether it’s best for someone to pursue Earning to Give normally depends on difficult to estimate empirical considerations unique to the situation, like some of those mentioned here, whether your cause is more talent-constrained or funding-constrained, what other people are doing, and issues like what else you could do with an Earning to Give job (often high earning jobs give you a useful platform to advance high impact causes independent of the money you donate yourself). When people have come to us in the past interested in pursuing Earning to Give, we’ve advised some to do it, and others not to do it. See our recent intro video for some examples.
This is why we welcome a recent article by ex-Givewell employee Jonah Sinick on why Earning to Give might not be optimal…
The concept of Earning to Give was featured in the Washington Post last week. See the article here.
In combination with Peter Singer’s TED talk on effective altruism, which mentions 80,000 Hours, we’ve been receiving very heavy and sustained web traffic – over 10,000 visitors in just two weeks.
The Washington Post article generated a number of high profile responses, including an opinion piece in the New York Times, a piece in the National Review, and a mention on Daily Mail Online – the world’s most read online newspaper. (Unfortunately they call us 8,000 Hours!)
There was much praise for the idea of Earning to Give and Effective Altruism, as well as the dedication of the people mentioned. Many of the criticisms, including those reflected more generally in the comments, are criticisms or misunderstandings we have addressed many times in the past, for instance in our FAQ about Earning to Give, in this series of three blog posts, and in Will’s original paper.
Peter Singer gave a TED talk on “The Why and How of Effective Altruism,” which you can watch here, which mentions 80,000 Hours.
It’s been interesting to look at people’s reactions both on the TED website, and on YouTube…
What can you do if you’re pursuing Earning to Give but aren’t currently sure what organisation to donate to? You can set up a donor advised fund which has all the psychological and tax benefits that go along with donating, while still holding off on your decision as to which charity is best. In this post Ben West tells you how.