Quick takes

Make your high-impact career pivot: online bootcamp (apply by Sept 14) Many accomplished professionals want to make a bigger difference with their career, but don’t always know how to turn their skills into real-world impact. We (the Centre for Effective Altruism) have just launched a new, free, 4-day online career bootcamp designed to help with that. How it works: * Runs Sept 20–21 & 27–28 (weekends) or Oct 6–9 (weekdays) * Online, 6–8 hours/day for 4 days * For accomplished professionals (most participants mid-career, 5+ years’ experience, but not a hard requirement) What you’ll get: * Evaluate your options: identify high-impact career paths that match your skills and challenge blind spots * Build your network: meet other experienced professionals pivoting into impact-focused roles * Feedback on CVs: draft, get feedback, and iterate on applications * Make real progress: send applications, make introductions, or scope projects during the bootcamp itself Applications take ~30 mins and close Sept 14. If you’re interested yourself, please do apply! And if anyone comes to mind — colleagues, university friends, or others who’ve built strong skills and might be open to higher-impact work — we’d be grateful if you shared this with them.

  I've now spoken to  ~1,400 people as an advisor with 80,000 Hours, and if there's a quick thing I think is worth more people doing, it's doing a short reflection exercise about one's current situation.  Below are some (cluster of) questions I often ask in an advising call to facilitate this. I'm often surprised by how much purchase one can get simply from this -- noticing one's own motivations, weighing one's personal needs against a yearning for impact, identifying blind spots in current plans that could be triaged and easily addressed, etc.   A long list of semi-useful questions I often ask in an advising call   1. Your context: 1. What’s your current job like? (or like, for the roles you’ve had in the last few years…) 1. The role 2. The tasks and activities 3. Does it involve management? 4. What skills do you use? Which ones are you learning? 5. Is there something in your current job that you want to change, that you don’t like? 2. Default plan and tactics 1. What is your default plan? 2. How soon are you planning to move? How urgently do you need to get a job? 3. Have you been applying? Getting interviews, offers? Which roles? Why those roles? 4. Have you been networking? How? What is your current network? 5. Have you been doing any learning, upskilling? How have you been finding it? 6. How much time can you find to do things to make a job change? Have you considered e.g. a sabbatical or going down to a 3/4-day week? 7. What are you feeling blocked/bottlenecked by? 3. What are your preferences and/or constraints? 1. Money 2. Location 3. What kinds of tasks/skills would you want to use? (writing, speaking, project management, coding, math, your existing skills, etc.) 4. What skills do you want to develop? 5. Are you interested in leadership, management, or individual contribution? 6. Do you want to shoot for impact? H

EU opportunities for early-career EAs: quick overview from someone who applied broadly I applied to several EU entry programmes to test the waters, and I wanted to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I'm still uncertain about, hoping to get some insights. Quick note: I'm a nurse, currently finishing a Master of Public Health, and trying to contribute as best I can to reducing biological risks. My specialisation is in Governance and Leadership in European Public Health, which explains my interest in EU career paths. I don’t necessarily think the EU is the best option for everyone. I just happen to be exploring it seriously at the moment and wanted to share what I’ve learned in case it’s useful to others. ⌨️ What I applied to & how it went * Blue Book traineeship – got it (starting October at HERA.04, Emergency Office of DG HERA) * European Committee of the Regions traineeship – rejected in pre-selection * European Economic & Social Committee traineeship – same * Eurofound traineeship – no response * EMA traineeship (2 applications: Training Content and Vaccine Outreach) – no response * Center for Democracy & Technology internship – no response * Schuman traineeship (Parliament) – no response * EFSA traineeship – interview but no feedback (I indicated HERA preference, so not surprised) If anyone needed a reminder: rejection is normal and to be expected, not a sign of your inadequacy. It only takes one “yes.” 📄 Key EA Forum posts that informed and inspired me * “EAs interested in EU policy: Consider applying for the European Commission’s Blue Book Traineeship” * “What I learned from a week in the EU policy bubble” – excellent perspective on the EU policymaking environment 🔍 Where to find EU traineeships All together here: 🔗 https://eu-careers.europa.eu/en/job-opportunities/traineeships?institution=All Includes Blue Book, Schuman, and agency-specific roles (EMA, EFSA, ECDC...). Traineeships are just traineeships: don’t underestimate what

I'd like to get feedback on the writing style of this post. I want to try to write up bi-monthly updates but don't enjoy sinking time into writing. I've never really stuck with blogging despite it being valuable for sharing what I'm working on as I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I end up spending hours combing over the posts I make. I'd like my posts to only take 30 minutes, so my current ideas are to write quickly and post as is, or to have an AI edit out my mistakes. Which of the two do you prefer? Do you have any suggestions on ways to make quick blog posts without potentially attaching poor communication or AI slop to myself? My original post. My prompt. Claude's edit of my post: ------ My Two-Month Deep Dive into AI Safety: From Imposter Syndrome to Clarity How ARBOx and ARENA helped me navigate a career transition into AI Safety—and what I learned about myself along the way Two months ago, I committed to spending my summer diving headfirst into AI Safety. As someone with a background in Swift development and traditional software engineering, the world of Transformers, Linear algebra, and AI alignment research felt like an entirely different universe. Here's what happened when I threw myself into ARBOx and ARENA—the good, the challenging, and the surprisingly clarifying moments that helped shape my career transition. Week 1-3: ARBOx in Oxford - Swimming in the Deep End ARBOx accepted me for their intensive program: one week of prerequisites, followed by two weeks of in-person training in Oxford. The reality check was swift. During pair programming sessions, I was often the weaker partner. While my colleagues brought post-grad experience with deep learning or career backgrounds in ML, I was frantically trying to remember basic PyTorch syntax. My years of Swift development, unit testing, and design patterns suddenly felt irrelevant when staring at Jupyter notebooks full of tensor operations. However, being the "slower" partner was actually incredibly v

Having a savings target seems important. (Not financial advice.) I sometimes hear people in/around EA rule out taking jobs due to low salaries (sometimes implicitly, sometimes a little embarrassedly). Of course, it's perfectly understandable not to want to take a significant drop in your consumption. But in theory, people with high salaries could be saving up so they can take high-impact, low-paying jobs in the future; it just seems like, by default, this doesn't happen. I think it's worth thinking about how to set yourself up to be able to do it if you do find yourself in such a situation; you might find it harder than you expect. (Personal digression: I also notice my own brain paying a lot more attention to my personal finances than I think is justified. Maybe some of this traces back to some kind of trauma response to being unemployed for a very stressful ~6 months after graduating: I just always could be a little more financially secure. A couple weeks ago, while meditating, it occurred to me that my brain is probably reacting to not knowing how I'm doing relative to my goal, because 1) I didn't actually know what my goal is, and 2) I didn't really have a sense of what I was spending each month. In IFS terms, I think the "social and physical security" part of my brain wasn't trusting that the rest of my brain was competently handling the situation.) So, I think people in general would benefit from having an explicit target: once I have X in savings, I can feel financially secure. This probably means explicitly tracking your expenses, both now and in a "making some reasonable, not-that-painful cuts" budget, and gaming out the most likely scenarios where you'd need to use a large amount of your savings, beyond the classic 3 or 6 months of expenses in an emergency fund. For people motivated by EA principles, the most likely scenarios might be for impact reasons: maybe you take a public-sector job that pays half your current salary for three years, or maybe you'

I am too young and stupid to be giving career advice, but in the spirit of career conversations week, I figured I'd pass on advice I've received which I ignored at the time, and now think was good advice: you might be underrating the value of good management! I think lots of young EAish people underrate the importance of good management/learning opportunities, and overrate direct impact. In fact, I claim that if you're looking for your first/second job, you should consider optimising for having a great manager, rather than for direct impact. Why? * Having a great manager dramatically increases your rate of learning, assuming you're in a job with scope for taking on new responsibilities or picking up new skills (which covers most jobs). * It also makes working much more fun! * Mostly, you just don't know what you don't know. It's been very revealing to me how much I've learnt in the last year, I think it's increased my expected impact, and I wouldn't have predicted this beforehand. * In particular, if you're just leaving university, you probably haven't really had a manager-type person before, and you've only experienced a narrow slice of all possible work tasks. So you're probably underrating both how useful a very good manager can be, and how much you could learn. How can you tell if someone will be a great manager? * This part seems harder. I've thought about it a bit, but hopefully other people have better ideas. * Ask the org who would manage you and request a conversation with them. Ask about their management style: how do they approach management? How often will you meet, and for how long? Do they plan to give minimal oversight and just check you're on track, or will they be more actively involved? (For new grads, active management is usually better.) You might also want to ask for examples of people they've managed and how those people grew. * Once you're partway through the application process or have an offer, reach out to current employees fo

I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer! The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3 I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advising calls I did and feel very privileged I got to talk to so many people and try and help them along their careers! I've learned so much during my time at 80k. And the team at 80k has been wonderful to work with - so thoughtful, committed to working out what is the right thing to do, kind, and fun - I'll for sure be sad to leave them. There are a few main reasons why I'm leaving now: 1. New career challenge - I want to try out something that stretches my skills beyond what I've done before. I think I could be a good fit for being a founder and running something big and complicated and valuable that wouldn't exist without me - I'd like to give it a try sooner rather than later. 2. Post-EA crises stepping away from EA community building a bit - Events over the last few months in EA made me re-evaluate how valuable I think the EA community and EA community building are as well as re-evaluate my personal relationship with EA. I haven't gone to the last few EAGs and switched my work away from doing advising calls for the last few months, while processing all this. I have been somewhat sad that there hasn't been more discussion and changes by now though I have been glad to see more EA leaders share things more recently (e.g. this from Ben Todd). I do still believe there are some really important ideas that EA prioritises but I'm more circumspect about some of the things I think we're not doing as well as we could (

I notice a pattern in my conversations where someone is making a career decision: the most helpful parts are often prompted by "what are your strengths and weaknesses?" and "what kinds of work have you historically enjoyed or not enjoyed?" I can think of a couple cases (one where I was the recipient of career decision advice, another where I was the advice-giver) where we were kinda spinning our wheels, going over the same considerations, and then we brought up those topics >20 minutes into the conversation and immediately made more progress than the rest of the call to that point. Maybe this is because in EA circles people have already put a ton of thought into considerations like "which of these jobs would be more impactful conditional on me doing a 8/10 job or better in them" and "which of these is generally better for career capital (including skill development, networks, and prestige)," so it's the conversational direction with the most low-hanging fruit. Another frame is that this is another case of people underrating personal fit relative to the more abstract/generally applicable characteristics of a job.