Hey Martyna, might I suggest getting in contact with High Impact Professionals? In addition to your financial contributions, they might be able to suggest opportunities to donate your skills.

Is there any chance you could share what field you are in? It might be worth asking around to see how many EAs are in that field and forming some kind of group or network. For example, there is a network of EAs working in supply chain and logistics, which I found surprising given how niche the area is, but I suppose the thing about these communities is that they often just need a single person driving them.

Definitely agree that you are onto something here. I was thinking of starting a 40K about a year ago and I have heard others echo the same sentiment, even with the same name (40K) as well. I ended up recently co-founding High Impact Professionals instead, focussed on all EA working professionals, regardless of age. We are trying to get this group to have the most impact they can given their unique resources. One initiative we have in the pipeline is to cross-pollinate the knowledge, skills and experience that e.g. 40Kers have with EA orgs who need them.

Although I do occasionally personally take calls with mid-career EA professionals looking to have more impact, this isn't a focus of HIP. I think with these calls I can provide value in 1) basic coaching and encouragement and 2) helping the person make connections in the EA community and understand some tenets of EA. In terms of helping them get a specific job, this is often quite difficult as the skillsets are often quite specific and older folk tend to have more constraints (can't move, require a certain salary, etc). 

That being said, I think there is a lot of room for someone to push this initiative forward and that with a solid plan something like a 40K could succeed. There are many EAs in your position and they can use the support!

I am happy to chat more if you are interested, just ping me on the forum and we can set something up.

Thank you for posting this! I'm in my mid-40s and it took me some years to get more into the EA movement due to the age difference and my not being sure what I could contribute. So I can very much understand this and also think supporting mid- and late-career people can be very helpful. For me, EAGs were the place to find and connect with other senior people and I now see many more possible ways I can play a growing role in the movement. Currently, I'm volunteering in a role I have much experience with and I see there is a need for this kind of work. 

I'm happy to see that High Impact Professionals (mentioned in another comment already) is taking on parts of this space. Giving What We Can also is adding more general advice around donations that could address some of your questions around donations. At least joining GWWC meetups helped me see that many people have anxieties around driving themselves to donation and income levels that may not be sustainable in the long term.

Less than 9% of respondents in the 2019 EA survey said they are over 45 and the 2020 survey seems similar. Missing out on a big part of the population that includes many people with high salaries, career capital, large networks and also more free time as children grow up seems like a waste. It also seems to me there are more people with grown children looking for meaning while having fewer financial obligations for whom more engagement in EA could be a good fit.

I'd be happy to chat and will send you a message.

Hey Martyna, I am also a mid-stage career UXD earning to give and volunteering my UX skills for EA causes (currently operating as Giving What We Can's Director of Design while working at Lyft in NYC)

If you ever want to connect about UX or EA (or combining the two) I would love to chat alex.savard@givingwhatwecan.org :)

Thanks for writing this, this is definitely something that I have heard before in EA groups that I have been part of.

I don't know your situation but I think that EA is probably, particularly in need of value-aligned mid/senior people in quite a few areas.

I don't work at 80k but my sense is that they have chosen to work with early-stage people as they have more flexibility in career direction and more malleable views. Crucially, I don't think that 80k chose this demographic because young and inexperienced people are likely to have a comparative advantage in most roles over mid/late career people, they are just excited about influencing young people's trajectories.

As I don't know your background I don't have much of a sense of what high impact roles could be a great fit for you, but when I meet people who are mid-career + are very value-aligned + are happy to move into a different job and are proactive enough to write a forum post (or engage with the community in other ways) I am generally pretty optimistic about them finding a high impact role somewhere (in or outside an EA org). Or if you don't want to move you might be able to advise/mentor younger people informally or through WANBAM or add a lot of value in another way. Maybe some patience and resilience are required here and I totally understand if you don't have the energy (I've certainly felt like this before).

If I were in your situation I think that I would try to speak to a few mid/late career people doing work that you admire and pick their brain on roles that might be a good fit for you (if you haven't already done lots of this). You could also try and attend an EAG or EAGx. If you don't want to move to a different role it looks like Giving What We Can want to invest quite a lot in building their community so I'm hopeful that there will be more support/resources for E2Gers soon.

Definitely agree that there's a big need to engage more experienced professionals. It seems that talent is a core bottleneck for EA, particularly super good entrepreneurs and operators who can found and scale highly effective orgs. 

Funny enough, I've been working on a project that I've been facetiously calling "40k" ... which has mostly been me working 1:1 with several people from the tech startup world (where I work as an investor and founder) to make  career shifts toward building EA projects. 

If anybody here is interested in chatting feel free to shoot me a DM. 

Seconded. I am surprised that in EA so much attention is paid and resources are devoted to people with relatively little life experience and professional experience. I often find myself a bit confused when I see someone in EA who is a COO or a VP or a director or a senior manager and who also has 0-3 years of work experience.

I'm in my 30s and I feel it is hard to get involved in EA other than "earn to give" because the career paths tend to either A) involve taking an entry level position in an EA hub city (such as Boston or San Francisco) or B) involve having a bachelor's degree in a particular field.

I'm not sure why several of the responses to this post are suggesting to take the conversation private.  I am in a similar situation with Martyna and would like to read these conversations to get some perspective and advice via eaves-dropping.  I'm confident there are others.

Small suggestion: I recommend putting a comma in the thousands (20,000) as reading 20000 has too many zeroes and can be misinterpreted as 200,000

Hi Martyna, maybe this post and its comments can interest you. 

Also, something else that comes to mind: Andrew Critch thinks that working on Human-Robot Interaction may be very useful to AI Safety. Note that he isn't solely talking about robots, but also human-machine interaction in general (that's how I interpret it; I may well be wrong):

HRI research is concerned with designing and optimizing patterns of interaction between humans and machines—usually actual physical robots, but not always.

Not sure whether other AI Safety researchers would agree on the importance of HRI, and not sure if your current career path is very relevant to this. Anyway, just sharing something that might be useful :)

Martyna, I'd be happy to chat with you -- just send me a PM. Like you, I'm about halfway through my career, and I executed a major career shift to move my work in a more impact-focused direction over the past several years. I'm happy to share what I learned in case it's helpful to you.

In addition, you might be interested to get to know the improving institutional decision-making community and field. I agree with calebp that EA could benefit from having a stronger network of mid-senior people in a variety of professional settings, so depending on what you do you might be able to help with that.

TL;DR: Maybe post your situation and we'll try to reply with something useful?

It would be more like getting custom advice from 80k rather than reading their generic career guide that might maybe not fit you (I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying custom advice would probably be better).

Also, as a community, I think it would be better to make sure we can give useful advice to some concrete people before we try to generalize into a written career guide that might miss important considerations or details

Very glad you wrote this! As I'm feeling the same way, most of the 80,000 hours site is aimed at the much younger (and affluent) crowd. There are a lot of people (me included) working day jobs in their fields that want to make a difference as well,  but are probably not going to move to pursue a PhD in AI and move to London, cause you know....life and stuff.