Training Bottlenecks in EA (professional skills)

Great post- Kathryn of WANBAM here. I would be very happy to share insights on what I have found has and hasn't worked with mentorship projects with anyone considering exploring this area. We have provided similar insights to emerging mentorship programs over the last 6 months or so. You can find me at <eamentorshipprogram@gmail.com>. Thank you.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. I agree this is an important topic with potential room for significant improvements.

FWIW, my impression is that I've benefited significantly from both courses and reading books (though of course it's hard to attribute counterfactual impact), particularly on interpersonal skills, leadership, and self/time management.

One observation I find quite striking is that in previous communities and organizations I encountered such training opportunities significantly more often, and felt they were generally more appreciated, than in EA. 

Specifically, during my university years I was involved in a student-run nonprofit, and this nonprofit - while naturally  less 'professional' and less well run than the typical EA organization in various ways - spent significant resources on training and furthering the education of the student activists running it.

These efforts included two yearly events that included workshops (with both internal and external facilitators/instructors) for the org's leadership and all org members/activists, respectively; a member of the executive board one of whose few key responsibilities it was to promote the professional development of activists; and a more fuzzy, cultural appreciation for such matters that led people to frequently sign up for external workshops, apply for grants or external mentorship schemes, etc.

Now, the actual mission of that organization was to promote higher education in post-conflict regions, and today for the broad purpose of improving lives in poor countries I'd donate to any GiveWell-recommended charity over that one in the blink of an eye. But for the purpose of improving my own skills, I think I'd seriously consider going back. In fact, I sadly think that in many ways that organization did a better job at promoting the professional development of its Europe-based student activists than at actually helping people in its target countries.

I was part of that organization for roughly as long as I've been into EA. At that org, I participated in countless workshops on things like time management, leadership styles, active listening, how to give and receive feedback, project management, impact assessment, risk management, preventing corruption, monitoring & evaluation, and many other things. They were hit-and-miss, and some were largely a waste of time in hindsight. But overall I feel like I've learned a lot, and am grateful for many opportunities to pick up and practice many skills I use every day in my current work in EA.

This changed dramatically when I started to work for EA organizations. With the exception of one CFAR workshop - which I found significantly less useful per unit of time - I don't recall participating in any workshop or training opportunity that tapped into external expertise, and only 1-2 'internal' ones. Nor do training opportunities get brought to my attention nearly as often.

(I'm also glossing over significant within-EA variance here. I've worked for two EA employers, and think that one had a culture significantly more conducive to staff development than the other even in the abscence of externally led workshops.)

One big caveat in this story is that the difference might be largely explained by experience/age. It is to be expected that, e.g., someone's first workshop on project management is more useful than later training (diminishing returns). Perhaps EA employers are correctly perceiving that most employees - even if they're recent graduates - have picked up the basics elsewhere, and that investing into further improvements is no longer worth it.

However, I'm skeptical that this is the full explanation. Overall, this aspect of my experience is one significant reason why I'm generally reluctant to enthusiastically recommend work "in EA" compared to work at institutions/orgs with an established track record of people learning/improving a lot there.

More broadly, my impression is that "professional development" or on-the-job training are explicit functions in most larger companies that have dedicated staff and resources. I haven't seen this in EA, though perhaps this is simply explained by most EA orgs being relatively small.

On the point of finding useful courses, Edo Arad asked earlier What are some good online courses relevant to EA?, mentioned a couple, and got a few more answers. Though most weren't focused on "professional skills such as fundraising or management". 

Maybe if people have additional course ideas, they could mention them as answers to that question post? Or maybe someone should make a new post to collect such course suggestions?

(This would be very much only a partial solution, but could be helpful.)

Weirdly not that much off-topic, but I'm curious about what else are you doing to "improve at forming views on difficult amorphous topics"?

Great post and thanks for sharing, 

<<Paying for courses. Instead, perhaps someone could take on doing the leg work to work out which courses in some important arena is best, and then secure funding for EAs to do those. >> 

I guess we (AAC) did try this with our Management and Leadership training for EAA organisations this year, although potentially we didn't do deep research into the available courses. We did spend some time prioritising based partially on academic research which ones we thought could be the most beneficial. 

I think for us a major failure point was more due to what you pointed out here:

"A problem that's even worse for mission driven organisations than others is that object-level work always seems more urgent and important than self-development." Some feedback we had from the management and leadership training we provided this year was that even though initially participants were bought in and excited to participate some failed to complete the course due to a lack of prioritization on their part (i think its great that our participants were so transparent about this)  not due to the suggested course content not being valuable.  It's possible however this was also due to our implementation, if we do this again we will try to approach the training differently by working with a smaller number of organisations and try to get more buy-in from leadership for example get them to allocate a certain number of hours to this training for the individual. 

I think a challenge is that the value of taking the course might not be quantifiable to the individual or the organisation. So even if you find a course that could be helpful to develop a key skill, how can you measure the benefit to both the individual and the organisation of the person taking the training vs. them spending time on an object-level project. Would be grateful if you had any insight on this.   

<<I’m therefore keen for EAs to do more brief write ups of specific things they’ve learned and how - say, what they found most useful in learning how to write well. Of course, sharing them publicly (like on this forum!) is especially useful. But even writing suggestions up quickly and sharing them with colleagues can be really helpful - my colleague Brenton is particularly great at noticing things he’s learned and quickly writing them up for others to benefit from>>

Would also be really keen on this, it could be a great way for people to self-improve on certain topics. 

<<Systematising mentorship>> 

I think Kathryn from WANBAM has done an excellent job in facilitating this and matching individuals well but i imagine to do it well it's also very time-consuming for the person facilitating. 

Anyway, loved reading this post so thanks for writing it up.

Lauren

Thanks for writing this up Michelle! I would be excited for you to write more things like this in the future. Regarding this:

The more similar to mine someone’s situation is, the more likely they’ll be able to recommend resources tailored to me

A common observation^[1] is that firms retain older employees but rarely hire them. One explanation for this is that organization-specific knowledge (what acronyms mean, how you make a project plan, etc.) is valuable, but general-purpose skills aren't as valuable, so there's no point in recruiting someone who has 30 years of experience from your competitor. (Or, alternatively: too few people actually learn valuable general-purpose skills for this to show up in the data.)

This roughly seems correct to me, anecdotally.

To the extent that this is accurate in EA, it might imply that EA-specific communication norms or other EA-specific things are the most valuable to train.

An additional hobbyhorse of mine is that certification might be more valuable than training. Having a mentor who can teach you things is nice, but it might actually be more valuable for these skilled and trusted mentors to evaluate people's existing abilities and then credibly certify them.

One small point of superficial feedback on this post: I feel like it could be useful to change the title to something like "Professional Skills Training Bottlenecks in EA", or "Professional Skills Training: A Bottleneck in EA"? 

I say this because I think training bottlenecks for things other than professional skills - e.g., learning about EA concepts or academic fields or research skills - are also quite important topics that are often discussed on the Forum. (E.g., in the posts tagged Research Training Programs.) And I think it'd also be good to someday have a post collecting ideas for addressing that broader set of training bottlenecks in EA.

So even though at the start you said "I’m focusing on professional skills such as fundraising or management, rather than learning about concepts in effective altruism, for which there seems to be a number of excellent programs happening", I think I still kept sort-of forgetting that the scope was intended to be limited in that way as I read the rest of the post. And I think that might've been due to how the title set my expectations. 

(Though maybe this is just me and my sleepy brain!)

+1, that "doing the leg work to work out which courses in some important arena is best" sounds like a great path! Perhaps you could supplement reputable educational content online with a systematized mentorship program or discussion group? This also rings true:

it’s hard to know in advance what you’ll need to know, and it’s hard to motivate yourself to do things in a self-directed way without a deadline. 

To improve the odds people find strong-match topics that they're motivated to learn, one might offer a "tasting menu" of intro materials for people interested in gaining skills, but uncertain which skills they will be motivated to learn via a paid course. For example, including 2-3 accessible academic interviews on YouTube or readings for those interested in: 

• Operations
• Management: these '11 and '13 book talks by Harvard's Kaplan, and this recent interview with Harvard's Frei, are approachable  starting points. The Management Center  serves dynamic non-profits and other mission-driven organizations, and offers resources (including sample staff communications, etc.) others might want to review to see if these are skills they want to double down on via a more-extensive case
• [Other topics (e.g., budgeting for non-profits or modeling uncertainty via Monte Carlo simulations), to increase the chance a certain topic is especially resonant to a rising leader at a given point in time]

Thanks for this post.

Some thoughts on the "Systematising mentorship" stuff:

• My impression is that WANBAM and Effective Thesis have essentially done some things that are similar to some of the things proposed in this section of this post. I imagine other EA- or EA-aligned orgs/people might've done so as well, in addition to presumably many non-EA orgs/people. So there might be a lot that could be learned from their approaches, successes, failures, thinking, etc.
• In a recent podcast interview, Rob Wiblin and Spencer Greenberg proposed a potentially easier way to capture part of the benefits that "Systematising mentorship" would also aim to capture: Just setting up weekly meetings with someone else who's at roughly the same level of seniority and who also wants more "management"/"mentorship"
  • I summarised some of what they said about that here
  • This of course wouldn't capture all the benefits of getting mentorship from a person with more expertise in an area than the mentee has, but it might capture the benefits that basically just require any "line manager" type person
• "A paid mentorship program could harm other mentorship programs and organic mentoring in the community by setting up an expectation that people providing mentorship be paid." That does seem to me plausible and worth noting.
  • But it also seems plausible that a paid mentorship could lead to people coming to see mentorship in general (even when provided for free) as more a more valuable, desired, "substantial" way of being helpful and having impact. And that could perhaps lead to more mentorship being offered, it being offered by higher-calibre mentors, or mentors being more motivated (again, even when the mentorship is free.)
  • On the other hand, the existence of some paid mentorship could also lead to people implicitly assuming that free mentorship is lower quality or something like that, which could have bad effects (e.g., leading to less supply of and demand for free mentorship).
  • (I'm therefore not sure what the net effect of this consideration would be.)

The 'Effective Manager' book you mention looks awesome. I'd also very highly recommend this book, focussed on all aspects of general non-profit management: Managing to Change The World, by Alison Green - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Managing-Change-World-Nonprofit-Managers/dp/1118137612