Should you try to plan your career?
On the one hand, goals provide direction and motivation. Especially if you care about really making a difference, you don’t want to be just stabbing in the dark. Yet at the same time, the world around you is constantly changing, as are you – isn’t it naive to plan for the future when you have no real idea what the job market will look like, what the world’s biggest needs might be, and what you might want personally
Are you interested in learning how to research charity effectiveness? Want training in communicating the idea of effective giving? Or want experience in the non-profit sector?
Our sister organisation, Giving What We Can, is running a summer internship programme for students interested in promoting effective charitable giving. On the two-week programme (16th-27th September 2013) interns will gain training and experience in the area of their choice; either cost-effectiveness research or communications.
For more information, go here
People often talk about how you should just “go with your gut” when choosing a career. But how useful is this advice, really?
In general, we should be wary of our intuitions about careers. This doesn’t mean intuitions have no part to play in career choice, but it’s worth double checking them.
GiveWell’s charity recommendations currently Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative are generally regarded as the most reliable in their field. I imagine many readers here donate to these charities. This makes it all the more surprising that it should be pretty easy to start a charity more effective than any of them.
All you would need to do is found an organisation that fundraises for whoever GiveWell recommends, and raises more than a dollar with each dollar it receives. Is this hard?
Suppose you’re looking to donate as much as possible to charity, and are choosing between two jobs. Should you worry about the taxes in each location? Since you can claim back taxes on charitable donations, many people think you don’t need to worry about this issue.
When you’re thinking about earning money to donate it to charity, you need compare different jobs on how much you’ll earn over your lifetime. We have an on-going project to help you work out which career path has the highest expected earnings for you. In this post I’m going to guide you through one of the best sources of earnings information – salary.com – and show you how to use it
Cal Newport is the best-selling author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which argues, as we have, against the common sense careers advice ‘do you what you’re passionate about’. He has also written about how to optimise academic study, for instance in How to Win at College. In this post he discussed a predictor of success in research, how it might be used, and suggests that we need more quantitative career planning. It is reposted with his permission from his blog.
There’s a general misconception that researchers are the only people who really contribute towards scientific progress. But there’s a lot of incredibly important work, besides research itself, that’s vital to producing important research, and such work is often underappreciated. We don’t realise how important other people working in academia are: people in administration, management, or communications. Their work is crucial; they bring it all together.
Most of us spend a lot of time visualising scenarios we’d like to happen, thinking about reasons the things we believe (or the things we want to believe) are likely to be true. We very rarely do the opposite: really thinking through worst case scenarios, or actively looking for reasons our deepest held beliefs are false. Why would we want to do this? We might found out something we don’t want to know. But this is exactly why we should do it.
I’ve recently been following a great new blog doing interviews with “research heroes” in the field of judgement and decision-making called InDecision. Some of these interviews seem like they could be really useful and interesting to anyone wanting to make a difference in a research career, and the blog’s editors have kindly agreed to let us repost some of them. First up: Richard Thaler, most famously co-author of global best-seller Nudge.
“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:
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.
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?).
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?
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.
It’s time. This is where you pull together all the information you have assembled to work out what you will be most likely to succeed at and which degrees will set you up to do good.
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.
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.
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.
Rob Wiblin and I interviewed Nick Bostrom, founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, about his career and ways to do high impact research.