On finding your ideal job

I am having 3 or so career conversation requests coming my way via different channels every month. Sometimes I still feel a tiny bit junior to be doing this, but I do have faith that my advice is actually useful to some extent:

• I have been supporting people in having a more impactful career as part of my job as Co-Director at EA Switzerland for 1.5 year
• I have developed / used frameworks for myself that have proven quite useful in my various transitions and decisions in my career

I recently realized I actually keep telling people some variants of the same four things. They’re not original to me at all, but collating them in one post seemed useful.

Talk to more people

As many as you can (in terms of energy, resources, and availability)! Usually more people than you would expect are actually within your reach and willing to talk to you. Just ask.^[1]

1. Identify them. Some useful prompts:
   1. Who would you like to be?
   2. Whose life would you want to experience a day of?
   3. Who has been recommended by your network?
2. Contact them. It’s easier than it looks:
   1. Either get an introduction, if you can.
      1. Easier if you’ve been suggested to meet them by someone. And you can also actively ask: who should I talk to, given these questions I have?
      2. Otherwise, just ask around - who do you know might know them? E.g. find the common links you might have on LinkedIn or other social media.
   2. Or just cold email. It’s surprisingly not that hard to find people’s emails, especially if you know where they work.
      1. And don’t forget to follow up.

I was worried I would look stupid and would burn myself if I just had a casual chat with people. But I quickly realized that having a genuine chat was usually just the trick. Ask people about their interests, and talk about yours. It’s surprisingly frequent to find common interests where you would have never delved into in a structured conversation.

I also have a secret-not-so-secret list of questions that I like to draw from when in conversations, and they’ve been quite useful to have meaningful, interesting encounters. You can replace “work” or “job” with “life” or any container for parts of people’s lives:

• What are the best and worst part about your job?
• What are main misconceptions in your field?
• What are one barrier and one opportunity in your unique context?
• What is the strongest disagreement you have with your colleagues or your peers?
• What most defies common sense in your work?
• What are most underestimated opportunities in your field?
• If you could change just one thing in your job or life what would it be?
• What is your biggest uncertainty in your work?
• What assumption about your work proved most wrong recently?
• What is a wild idea you haven’t shared yet?
• What are you most and least proud of?

Apply to more opportunities

And here I mean: probably more than what you are currently doing.^[2] There are multiple reasons why applying to more things is good:

1. You’ll get calibrated about what a specific job description means, and you’ll get information about a specific place
2. You’ll be more ready when the real dream opportunity comes up, because you trained on maybe-less-exciting opportunities
3. You’ll be signaling that you exist, with your specific, usually unique set of skills. People will hear about you, and they might recommend you.

Also, you can just offer to volunteer. If one place is your dream place, give your time for free for a bit, and maybe you’ll see that there’s actually nice place to be carved out for yourself there, and prove that you fit right in without involving to much effort on their end.

Write more and collect feedback

Lay your thoughts out on a Google Doc, and find trusted and critical people to review them.^[3]

It's generally a good practice to explain your thinking, understand your considerations better, weigh the pros and cons, identify your uncertainties and your needs. 

Depending on how important it is, layer the feedback:

• Give it ~rough (better earlier than later) to your closer, high-context network. You can also specify what you expect from people and how they can help
• If you need more, refine and send the second iteration to additional, maybe mentor-like people

It’s useful to get 3+ feedbacks at least, because you might overupdate on 1-2. You want the trends, not the hot takes that might not actually make sense in your specific context.

You might also want to get feedback on yourself (here is a template I made if you want one) - but you need to be in the right place and ready for what you might read. 

Quantitatively weigh your options

I first learned about this during the recruitment process for Charity Entrepreneurship where they ask you to perform this analysis for your different career options, and I have been using this quite regularly ever since, especially when I feel stuck in a decision I want to make (career-wise or not!).

It’s a good exercise to reflect on what you value (criteria) and to what extent (weights), and to figure out the good and not-so-good questions to trigger the right introspections and useful emotions to help you make decisions. Then put numbers on all that. You shouldn’t take the result at face value: this is just a model, and as any model, it can’t comprehensively represent what you’re trying to model. But it’s a good starting point.

You can also seek feedback on your scoring, though it’s usually a bit harder to read for other people.

I have developed my own WFM template, so feel free to make a copy and use it! There’s one tab specifically for career decisions, with more detailed questions and weights that you can adjust to your own preferences, and a tab with just the formulas.

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I hope this can be as useful to others as it has been for me over the years. I’d be happy to hear about other systems people use and compare!

1. ^{^}

     Part of this post by Cate Hall has some good explanations about this.

2. ^{^}

    This is a nice essay about the merits of applying. 

3. ^{^}

    Alex Lawsen wrote this post about collecting feedback on writeups, and is actually the first person to have introduced me to this practice.