Animal Advocacy Careers advice

By Jamie_Harris @ 2020-07-06T12:56 (+43)

Since we launched, Animal Advocacy Careers has been conducting some initial research, providing management and leadership training for employees of high-impact nonprofits, and preparing our public-facing content.
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We’re pleased to announce that we have now published our careers advice page.

This includes three skills profiles. These profiles summarise information about areas of expertise or career paths that might be an option for you to explore if you are interested in maximising your positive impact for animals. They contain information such as:

The skills profiles we have created so far, accessible via the careers advice page, are:

To supplement these skills profiles, we also created the following two documents:

We have also launched our one-to-one careers advice service; over the next few weeks we will begin contacting those who have expressed interest in this service (via our careers advice page) to invite them to apply.

To stay up to date with further content, you can like our Facebook page and subscribe to our newsletter.

avacyn @ 2020-07-06T17:55 (+8)

I'm a big fan of what you're trying to do! It could be very impactful.

However, I notice that your advice seems to be greatly skewed towards non-profits. For example, in your M&L overview, you don't spend much time on food tech as a potential application of M&L skills. You also don't give any information on the skill gaps currently facing plant-based / cultivated meat. I think this is a missed opportunity, as the gaps in those industry are important, and could be well suited for people who aren't a good fit for management, fundraising, or advocacy.

Is this a purposeful decision? Are you planning to augment this later?

Thanks for all of your work :)

Jamie_Harris @ 2020-07-06T18:58 (+5)

Thanks very much! Yes, we have a draft profile on "Technical research for animal-free food tech skills profile" and another on "Government, policy, and lobbying skills profile," so hopefully the apparent nonprofit skew is temporary.

One factor influencing the decision about which skills profiles to produce first was the evidence we had that they were a bottleneck. We'd started with a quick survey of nonprofits and a nonprofit "spot-check" and I hope to do similar (perhaps better) versions of both of those things for plant-based / cultivated meat companies too. So at that point, we might have more reason to explore particular skillsets out of that.

M&L is an example of this -- "leadership" came up a lot in the survey, but when I've not really come across the idea of leadership being a major bottleneck for these companies (unless you count "entrepreneurship" which is overlapping but partly separate). In that sector, I much more frequently hear that companies are struggling to get scientists on board. But once we do that research, its possible we'll decide that for-profit companies should figure more prominently in a revised version of the M&L profile, for instance.

(This also just relates to a tradeoff we faced of just doing more / better research before we start putting out advice vs trying to get some content out and update / improve as we go along. It was unclear where the balance should be struck there.)