Career Conversations Week (2025)

Hey everyone! As a philosophy grad transitioning into AI governance/policy research or AI safety advocacy, I'd love advice: which for-profit roles best build relevant skills while providing financial stability?

Specifically, what kinds of roles (especially outside of obvious research positions) are valuable stepping stones toward AI governance/policy research? I don’t yet have direct research experience, so I’m particularly interested in roles that are more accessible early on but still help me develop transferable skills, especially those that might not be intuitive at first glance.

My secondary interest is in AI safety advocacy. Are there particular entry-level or for-profit roles that could serve as strong preparation for future advocacy or field-building work?

A bit about me:
– I have a strong analytical and critical thinking background from my philosophy BA, including structured and clear writing experience
– I’m deeply engaged with the AI safety space: I’ve completed BlueDot’s AI Governance course, volunteered with AI Safety Türkiye, and regularly read and discuss developments in the field
– I’m curious, organized, and enjoy operations work, in addition to research and strategy

If you've navigated a similar path, have ideas about stepping-stone roles, or just want to chat, I'd be happy to chat over a call as well! Feel free to schedule a 20-min conversation here.

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

If you're considering a career in AI policy, now is an especially good time to start applying widely as there's a lot of hiring going on right now. I documented in my Substack over a dozen different opportunities that I think are very promising.

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 for casual conversations about their experiences with management at the org.
• You could ask how the organization handles performance reviews and promotions. This is probably an okay-not-great proxy, since smaller, fast-growing orgs might have informal processes but still excellent management, but I thin k it would give you some signal on how much they think about management/personal development.
• (This maybe only really works if you are socially very confident or know lots of EA-ish people, sorry about that) You could consider asking a bunch of your friends and acquaintances about managers they've had that they thought were very good, and then trying to work with those people.
• Some random heuristics: All else equal, high turnover rate without seemingly big jumps in career progression seems bad. Orgs that regularly hire and retain/promote early career people are probably pretty good at management; same for orgs whose alumni go on to do cool stuff. 

(My manager did not make me post this)

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.