Maybe let the non-EA world train you

By ElliotTep @ 2024-06-14T14:45 (+378)

This post is for EAs at the start of their careers who are considering which organisations to apply to, and their next steps in general.

Conclusion up front: It can be really hard to get that first job out of university. If you don’t get your top picks, your less exciting backup options can still be great for having a highly impactful career. If those first few years of work experience aren’t your best pick, they will still be useful as a place where you can ‘learn how to job’, save some money, and then pivot or grow from there. 

The main reasons are:

• The EA job market can be grim. Securing a job at an EA organisation out of university is highly competitive, often resulting in failing to get a job, or chaotic job experiences due to the nascent nature of many EA orgs. An alternative, of getting short-term EA grants to work independently is not much better, as it can lead to financial instability and hinder long-term professional growth.
• Non-EA jobs have a lot of benefits. They offer a stable and structured environment to build skills, learn organisational norms, get feedback, etc.
• After, you’ll be better placed to do directly impactful work. After a few years at a non-EA job, you’ll be better placed to fill a lot of roles at EA orgs. You might also be able to start something yourself.
• Caveats: Of course, take everything with a grain of salt. For every piece of advice, there is someone who needs to hear the opposite, and the advice in here is no exception. 

Acknowledgments: Thanks to the following people for giving some great feedback on an a draft of this post and making it better: David Nash, Matt Reardon, Chana Messinger, Karla Still, Michelle Hutchinson. All opinions are my own. All mistakes are chatGPT’s.

What’s the problem? Three failure modes of trying to get an EA job

It seems like a lot of people who are motivated by the ideas of effective altruism, use ‘get a job at an ‘EA org’ as shorthand for ‘how to have an impact with my career’ (this includes me, but more on that later). By EA org I mean the kind of organisation where most people working there are EAs. This is understandable. Figuring out how to have a positive impact with your career is really hard. It’s a reasonable heuristic that orgs within the EA community are more likely to have a big positive impact in the world than the average non-profit. Finally, we’re all sensitive to status in our community, and in some parts of EA, working at an EA org is definitely considered pretty darn cool. 

One issue with this that I want to briefly flag is that ‘working at an EA org’ and ‘doing impactful work’ are not interchangeable (Michelle at 80,000 Hours covers that well here). But the other thing that you probably know  is that EA jobs are really hard to get. They are really, really, competitive. Some jobs get hundreds of high-quality applications. I think this leads to a few failure modes.

Story 1 - Lots of rejections: An ambitious, smart, highly engaged EA, fresh out of uni, applies to a lot of EA organisations. They make it far in the hiring rounds, maybe even to trial periods. But, after many disheartening months of applications, trial tasks, and interviews, they don’t get an EA job at an EA org. 

Story 2 - Chaotic EA Job: Alternatively, maybe they get the job at an impactful organisation™, thinking they’ve made it past the hard bit. However, many EA orgs are very young. This can lead to things like a chaotic onboarding, a lack of HR practices, inexperienced managers, and sudden changes in funding or strategy that can leave them without a job. And if that isn’t enough, EA branding does not guarantee an org is doing impactful work.

Both of these stories are pretty bad. These situations are psychologically and financially taxing. This is both personally bad and can harm your motivation to keep trying to help others. Both of these stories take a lot of effort but without the rewards of professional growth or a salary. 

However, at the end of these stories, incentives push towards picking another job at a non-EA org. I think this is a relatively good outcome in the end (more on that below). Unfortunately, I think there’s a third story, that didn’t exist in EA seven years ago, that is causing extra problems. This is the story of limping from grant to grant.

Story 3 - Limping from grant to grant: In 2017, if you applied to a bunch of EA jobs, and didn’t get any, money would force you to find another job. In 2024, this is no longer the case. With the prevalence of small grants and a range of contractor work (e.g. community building, virtual program facilitator, etc) it’s possible to get enough funding to do direct work. When funders give small grants to early-career individuals, they’ll often make bets with tail outcomes in mind, like ‘maybe this person will be shockingly good. They probably won’t be, but it’s worth taking the bet.’ This strategy makes sense if you’re a time-poor funder taking a hits-based approach. 

But if you are the person receiving the grant, and your career plan is to go from grant to grant for the next few years, I think this is problematic for several reasons:

• Often the funding is enough to just get by, especially if you are used to being a student. This means the financial forces that force you into a non-EA job no longer exist. A 3-month grant and a few virtual programs a year is enough to stay in this cycle indefinitely.
• This isn’t going to be the best way to try and have the biggest impact over the course of your career.  In the long run, I think it’s often better to grow at a stable organisation for a few years (especially if you’re fresh out of university), and then re-pursue directly working on impactful projects later. Here’s why…

Maybe let the non-EA world train you

Maybe let the non-EA world train you. In addition to applying for that dream EA job fresh out of university, I encourage you to see getting a job with decent career capital as a good next step. It doesn’t need to be a top 4 consulting firm or a white house internship. Lots of other types of career capital are better than a string of failed applications, and in my opinion, better than limping from grant to grant or contractor work. Some of the benefits of a non-EA job, as opposed to going from grant to grant:

1. Slowly grow your skill tree: an entry-level job means you start working on small problems, and then once you master them, are given bigger and bigger challenges. It can start with formatting slides, or learning some spreadsheet formulas, or summarising research. Then you move from doing tasks, to managing parts of projects, to managing projects, to large projects with several people working under you. At each stage, some time is given to learn that skill properly. 
2. Learn how normal organisations work: There’s a lot to be said about working at a normal functioning organisation for a few years. Even a poorly run organisation will still imbue dozens of big and small lessons that you’ll pick up. While these aren’t always great practices, they’re better than trying to learn everything from first principles and Google. 
3. A stable workplace: There are lots of times it makes sense to work at an uncertain or unstable workplace, such as a startup that is pursuing something ambitious. But let me tell you, there’s something to be said for a workplace that is stable. Wondering if you’ll have a job next quarter or year takes up a lot of mental energy. That is energy that isn’t being spent on other things like focusing on the project in front of you, self-development, hobbies,  friends, or literally anything else.  
4. Get feedback from a manager (hopefully): This one varies more from organisation to organisation and manager to manager. But a good manager, who is interested in your growth, is incredibly valuable early in your career. 

What’s more, EA organisations know the above as well. If I see two similar candidates, but one has 3 years of professional experience and one is fresh out of university,  I’ll assume the more experienced candidate will have a lot of extra soft skills. Sometimes, the right graduate will be a great fit for a role. But I think this is more the exception than the rule. 

Let’s get specific. Some of my story

This is all very abstract so far, so I thought I’d share some of my story. 

My background: I applied for a few EA jobs in 2018/2019. I went into these applications with 2.5 years of work experience. But the experience was scrappy and piecemeal, including 2 years as a part-time research assistant in psychology research spanning 3 universities, and about 8 months as a part-time data analyst at a public health consultancy. 

Failure to launch: I made it very far in a few rounds, getting to a probation at Longview Philanthropy, and a 3-week trial at GiveWell. I ultimately didn’t get either job. I think in both instances a lot of the mistakes I made were about making some weird or poor choices in how I approached my work that stemmed from not having a good understanding of what was wanted from me, and some soft skills like how to manage up. It didn’t help that both organisations are unusually selective about hiring either.  This period really sucked for me. If I wasn’t socially connected in the London EA community at the time there’s a good chance that would have been it for me and EA. 

My non-EA career break: With my tail between my legs, I finally lowered my bar substantially and got a role at an animal advocacyish non-profit. It was a more junior role, at an organisation that wasn’t particularly focused on impact, with an unengaged manager, and not great career capital.

And yet… several good things happened during this time. The job was stable, allowing me to learn some of the basics of ‘how to job’. For those of you wondering what kind of tasks I mean, it can range from sending well-crafted emails, planning and executing a project, using excel, running productive meetings, etc. Eventually, I learned slightly harder skills, like how to delegate, hire, manage, put in project proposals, etc. 

After 3 years of working at this organisation, I was in a far better place to apply for and meaningfully contribute at EA organisations. I got a few great job offers at organisations I was excited to work at (EA Australia and Farmed Animal Funders).  And I felt far more equipped when starting in these roles. 

Takeaways: I wasn’t particularly strategic about getting to this point. There are other jobs that would have built better career capital. I should have applied to those instead. And you should too. And yet, working at a normal, not too impressive organisation was good enough. More importantly, working at a standard and stable non-profit, for 3 years, gave me a range of skills that I didn’t get applying for EA jobs, or from a string of part-time contractor stints where I wasn’t integrated into a larger organisation.

Caveats

1. You should still apply to ambitious organisations! Some of you will get these jobs straight out of university and thrive. Just also apply to a range of other organisations as well. 
2. My take about ‘story 3 - limping from grant to grant’ is definitely something I’ve seen anecdotally. But maybe a grant or two out of university is a good approach for some people. Maybe it allows some people to do good independent work, and then get noticed and hired. If you think getting grants straight out of uni is good, I’d love to hear why. If you’re a funder who tends to fund these types of projects I’d love to hear why as well.
3. Some EA organisations are probably well-placed to hire and train graduates. If you’re looking for these jobs, I’d look for jobs that are explicitly entry-level. Just remember that they’ll still probably be very competitive.
4. I mention these briefly, but I want to reiterate: There is a huge amount of variance in which non-EA org you end up at. It isn’t the case that every EA org is a chaotic mess, and every non-EA org is great for career capital. 

Wrapping up

Don’t get me wrong, I think people should apply for ambitious roles straight out of university - both at EA orgs and at fancy non-EA orgs with career capital like Bain, or the White House. 

But to reiterate the advice I am trying to offer is this: It can be really hard to get that first job out of university. If you don’t get your top picks, your less exciting backup options can still be great for having a highly impactful career. If those first few years of work experience aren’t your best pick, they will still be useful as a place where you can ‘learn how to job’, save some money, and then pivot or grow from there. Good luck.