When I joined the CEA career bootcamp June cohort, I came in assuming I was still exploring. I found out after I wasn't. I have a settled cause area, a pipeline of more than a dozen aligned organisations, and years of operations and Chief of Staff experience.
The first thing the bootcamp did was push me to admit that out loud, which changed the whole question from "help me find my way in" to "I have a strong pipeline that isn't closing, so help me figure out why."
The second assumption it broke was that my gap was domain knowledge, that I needed to know more about AI safety before I'd be competitive. The exercises pushed back on that. I'd been reaching second and third interview rounds, which doesn't happen if your context and framing aren't landing. So the problem wasn't knowledge.
For a while I thought the lever was positioning, telling my story better so my generalist background reads as an asset rather than a gap. That is true, and it helped. But the most useful reframe came when I looked at where my applications were dying.
The binding constraint wasn't positioning at all. It was hireability across borders and not knowing people in the system so to say. I'm based in Nigeria, and "remote-global" job descriptions kept turning out, in practice, to favour candidates already in SF, DC, or London. The question of whether an org could hire me at all was firing silently, late, after I'd invested in expensive processes.
Your article addresses the challenge some of us senior operators are having securing a role in the sector. I hope with what your organisation and others like Kairos are doing, things will improve significantly.
When I joined the CEA career bootcamp June cohort, I came in assuming I was still exploring. I found out after I wasn't. I have a settled cause area, a pipeline of more than a dozen aligned organisations, and years of operations and Chief of Staff experience.
The first thing the bootcamp did was push me to admit that out loud, which changed the whole question from "help me find my way in" to "I have a strong pipeline that isn't closing, so help me figure out why."
The second assumption it broke was that my gap was domain knowledge, that I needed to know more about AI safety before I'd be competitive. The exercises pushed back on that. I'd been reaching second and third interview rounds, which doesn't happen if your context and framing aren't landing. So the problem wasn't knowledge.
For a while I thought the lever was positioning, telling my story better so my generalist background reads as an asset rather than a gap. That is true, and it helped. But the most useful reframe came when I looked at where my applications were dying.
The binding constraint wasn't positioning at all. It was hireability across borders and not knowing people in the system so to say. I'm based in Nigeria, and "remote-global" job descriptions kept turning out, in practice, to favour candidates already in SF, DC, or London. The question of whether an org could hire me at all was firing silently, late, after I'd invested in expensive processes.
Your article addresses the challenge some of us senior operators are having securing a role in the sector. I hope with what your organisation and others like Kairos are doing, things will improve significantly.