Executive Summary
A career memo is basically an infodump of your context that maps out who you are, what you want to do abstractly and then specific options you are considering.
This is a quick pitch to everyone to write something like this (especially students and early career/ career transitioning folks) and not just a resume. Here’s some quick rationale:
1) Career Memos let you more critically analyse your own skills and growth areas by giving you a structured reflection
2) Career Memos help make your skills, reflections and career interests legible to potential employers
3) People are generally happier to leave high-leverage comments on a doc than have a long 1-1 chat to get the same context - it is also just a great signal that you care enough to write something like this up!
I made a quick template to get myself to do this based on similar ones I’ve seen by Michael Aird and goal-setting docs at ERA. Please do use this if it’s helpful and make any edits that work for you!
Reflection
I’ve struggled for a while to concretely identify my strengths and growth areas. I think it’s genuinely quite hard to critically reflect on these because it’s vulnerable and can be hard/ dangerous without some structure to support you.
I think this difficulty is especially highlighted for people with more meta career paths, like community building or people without a clear career trajectory.
I also think people generally undervalue skills that don’t fit into traditional skill lists/ experience that isn’t technically professional. How you interact outside of work can reveal as much (if not more) about your personal fit than just the role you are assigned. I’ve had quite a few career chats with people who seem really good at particular soft skills, but don't recognise it because they don't have much “experience” on paper.
For a particular example, a junior friend who’s really good at project management and execution casually let me know that she used to manage a theatre company at Uni using the exact sort of skills she now excels at in her current role, but never considered that experience to be relevant/ revealing of her personal fit.
I also quite like the “Practical Constraints” section in my template. In career chats I’ve had or witnessed, it often takes a long time to get some initial suggestions/ advice before the person reveals that these actually aren’t relevant because of some hard practical constraint they can’t / aren’t interested in working around. Clearly listing these can help constrain advice to just what is helpful/ actually possible.
Legibility
It can be pretty difficult to explain soft skills. Even for technical folks, a publication or article is only the final deliverable of potentially months or years of hard work that took many more skills than can be cleanly demonstrated in the final product.
However, these skills are the things that make you particularly well-suited to different roles - if you really care about impact, you should want to be in the BEST role possible. This does partly depend on opportunity, but as I argue elsewhere, I think often impactful roles are constrained more by the exact right positions not existing to leverage the existing talent in the field, rather than that talent just not being around. In part, this is for sure an issue with the mechanisms that exist within AI Safety and other nascent fields, but one way individuals can push against this is by finding ways to communicate the specific edge that makes you REALLY well-suited to a specific thing.
These weird edges can be quite hard to capture from output alone cause before you’re actually in this ideal role, this crazy edge may not be demonstrated/ used at all!
A resume/ LinkedIn relies on people reading between the lines to see the overall picture past specific experiences/ publications, whereas a less formal memo can skip this interpretation and just put the message in front of people’s faces!
If you want to be in a role that really leverages this edge, you need to communicate it! A career memo is a great way of doing that since you can be as direct as you want. If an org hired for every skillset they would benefit from, they would never stop running application rounds! Just because an org isn’t actively hiring doesn’t mean they wouldn’t love to see the profile of someone who would unblock their org or scale it specifically because of you
Feedback
The memo that I wrote took a few hours while I had some extra capacity one weekend, and has led to more useful career feedback than I’ve managed to get over the past few months of having many conversations/ 80K advising.
My career path is quite weird, and conversations often take a long time for people to actually get on the same page about my skills/ theory of change. Once we actually get there, it often ends up with people suggesting the same career paths I’ve already considered, which I’ve often shut down for one reason or another.
By putting all of this information in front of someone before they even think about suggestions, I save both of our time and also get more counterfactually useful suggestions!
I also think it’s a fantastic signal to share with people that you care enough about impact and being leveraged in the right position that you reflect critically on this, and are willing to take this seriously!
Conclusion
Your to-do list:
- Go and spend up to 3 hours writing this doc
- If the template does not work for you, take it into Claude and edit it until it matches your preferences/ what makes this approachable for you! (e.g. get it to ask you one question at a time and then format it)
- Send it to at least 5 people in your network (friends, colleagues, managers, etc.)
- Use this improved career memo in applications and cold emails to people you look up to in your field and orgs you want to work for!
Feel free to reach out to me (sdms2005@gmail.com) with any feedback on the template. I may have some capacity to leave feedback on your own memo, but I would rely more on people who have some insight into your personal fit for the best feedback.