Group Organiser Survey on Career Advice Bottlenecks

By Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸 @ 2020-02-17T18:53 (+18)

The Local Career Advice Network is running a group organiser survey on career advice bottlenecks to gather more accurate knowledge about career advice bottlenecks in the EA community. We will use this information to evaluate existing career advice activities, identify pain points for group organisers and work on the most projects to resolve those pain points.

If you helped organise an EA group in 2019, even if you haven't engaged in many formal career activities, please fill out the Career Advice Bottlenecks survey to help us learn more about your group’s career activities and your personal career bottlenecks. If you weren’t involved in 2019 and think the group is still active, please forward this survey to the current organiser(s).

You can fill out the survey here: https://ee.humanitarianresponse.info/x/#bMyXcgFx

We are asking for responses by Sunday March 1st 2020.

Why is filling out this survey a valuable use of time?

• This is a neglected area of career advising: No systematic or representative research has been done on group members’ main bottlenecks to pursuing high impact careers or challenges group organisers face in providing this career advice. We believe addressing these bottlenecks is the best way to improve career advising.
• Improve coordination: One main challenge in this area, and a reason it is neglected, is because this space is very decentralised and difficult to coordinate. Gaining this knowledge will improve future coordination efforts, efficiency and avoid duplication.
• Gives group organisers an opportunity to reflect: Organisers who filled out this survey found the process of reflecting on bottlenecks was very valuable.
• We will take action based on the data: This survey is designed to collect actionable data, and will directly influence the projects we do and recommendations we make. We will actively share our insights with the broader EA community and key stakeholders like CEA and 80,000 Hours (who have advised us on this project so far).
• We have produced useful outputs: We have created several working documents including an annotated bibliography compiling community career advice, and a network which hosts regular calls and coordinates projects. We plan to track current projects to improve our knowledge while we conduct meta-level research like this survey. You can see a list of project outputs here, and our project outputs folder here.
• Read more about our project goals here.

What is the background for this project?

Our project was initially prompted by issues faced by many group organisers in regions outside of the main EA hubs (e.g. the Bay area and London). These groups range widely in geography, group structure and membership and all have challenges regarding career advice. Many felt that current career advice didn’t apply to their members, or was too restricted in its geographic relevance. Given that the groups we wanted to help were so diverse, we wanted to identify projects, resources and services that could be useful to multiple groups and be an effective use of resources.

We decided to develop two branches of the project: a meta-level research arm, and a careers advice network arm.

The meta-level arm focuses on improving our knowledge of the career advice landscape. Since there was very little visibility into the current state of career advice globally, we decided to survey group organisers as a first step. Depending on the outcomes of this survey we may also survey group members to pinpoint bottlenecks.

The careers advice network will help improve coordination and the quality of projects in this space. Further, through the network we are able to make sure that the data we are collecting is useful and actionable. We host monthly calls on relevant topics, connect people to others working on similar projects, and provide feedback on their projects.

You can read more here: bit.ly/LCANproposal.

Questions?

If you have any questions please reach out to Vaidehi Agarwalla at vaidehiagarwalla@gmail.com or on the EA Groups slack.