Highlights

I enjoyed Career Conversations Week, and I’m thankful to all who took part. There were so many great posts that many of them are under-read/ under-rated. So I’d highly recommend reading a random post from the tag, and adding (or subtracting) karma.

I particularly enjoyed:

• My colleague Rika’s 6 years of building an EA-aligned career from an LMIC. As Geoffrey points out in a comment, the concrete details here make the post practically useful as well as motivational.
• Annika Burman’s Why You Should Build Your Own EA Internship Abroad. The post is well-written and interesting, and I hope it inspires some readers to create their own internships (abroad or not).
• The comments on the debate I posted, Debate: Are enough EAs earning to give? - especially Calebp’s comment, where he bravely articulates the first ‘disagree’ take on a particularly lop-sided poll.  
• The entire Ask Career Advisors Anything AMA. It’s worth reading some of the comments even if you aren’t looking for career advice. The career advisors are really helpful and thoughtful, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that they’ve shifted a couple of careers in more impactful directions.

For more, check out my "Best of" sequence here.

What am I missing from the list? Please comment below with posts you think are underrated, or any feedback you have on the event.

Retrospective

In the announcement post, I wrote that “This is a week for sharing knowledge about careers, and putting us all in a better place to make career decisions.”, i.e. I was hoping that the content produced during the week would help people make better career decisions. Did we achieve that?

Well, 45 questions were answered by one or more career advisors on the AMA, so that’s around 45 people who were helped somewhat in their career decisions. Note that the recruiters' AMA continues until August 1.

I read some great posts that I’ll be linking to in the future; for example, I’d use this post when someone asks about internships. I loved the ‘writing about my job’ posts, and I saw other Forum users commenting that they loved them too. However, I’m fairly clueless as to how much the event influenced career choices^[1].

To add more to my understanding of the event, please consider leaving a comment if something you saw during Career Conversations Week is likely to influence your career decisions.

How did the week affect Forum growth?

Career Conversations Week felt like a banger. Reading through the Forum throughout the week, I saw really valuable conversations (especially with career advisors), and some fantastic posts.

But was it truly a banger?

Yes. The above table shows the change in two metrics I care about when I’m thinking about Forum growth^[2]. “Authors” are users who read more than 20 posts this year and posted a post or comment. "Users" are anyone who logged in this year. 

“Expected gain (no event)” is the number of authors and users we expect to add on any given week (based on the rate of gain over a few very consistent months earlier this year). The “expected difference” refers to the number of additional authors and users I anticipated we could add through a theme week before I ran the event. The actual difference ended up being much higher — 3-4x higher. Why?

A big part of it was the career advisors' AMA. Last I checked, 13 users had joined directly to comment on that post, and that’s likely an undercount (the figure is based on which page a user signs up from). We also did more consistent advertising than usual, with posts on LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, a range of EA slack channels, and twitter. Sadly, I don’t have great metrics for all of these, but based on the limited capacity it took, it seems worth doing this for future events. We also sent an email to Forum users, which resulted in approximately 300 clicks through to the AMA.

Other metrics

Fun fact: We have an internal metric “number of users who wrote a comment or quick take in the preceding 30 days”. During this event, we hit a number that we haven’t hit since 2023.

Below is a graph showing the percentage of engagement time spent on the event each day (0.15 = 15%). 283.5 hrs was spent on the event in total.

We also had 37 posts, which were (subjectively) almost all valuable. That’s more than any debate week.

Work and costs

The only cost for this event was staff time. How much work did the event take? I estimated about 2.5 story points for the event (ten hours of work), and this seems about right (if a little on the high side). If we estimate 2 hours each for the 6 career advisors in the AMA (which is the limit I encouraged them to set), that comes to 22 hours of work. I generally estimate $100/hr for EA jobs, so we can conservatively call this $2200 (or between 1 and 2 EAG tickets).

Did you find this event valuable?

I’d love to hear from you. Did anything you read cause you to update your career plans, or otherwise change your mind about something? Or, was there something you wanted to see that was missing? I’m likely to run an event like this again in the future, so feedback will be used!

1. ^{^}

    This wasn’t the main goal of the event, although it was a valued foreseen-consequence. With the CEA-wide strategy that we are working on this year, the direct goal of my work is generally (sustainable, valuable) growth. The metrics I directly measured are recorded in the next section of the retro. However, I care about many other things besides growth, so my work is generally of the form ‘get more valuable users on the Forum, while improving career decisions’ or ‘find more newsletter subscribers, who represent groups EA orgs would benefit from’.

2. ^{^}

    Not all types of growth are equal, and we don’t pursue growth on the Forum for its own sake. But over the past few years, the activity on the Forum has overall been shrinking. It’s my view that many more people could benefit from the Forum than do. This year, we’re looking for ways to grow/maintain the Forum sustainably (i.e. without our quality metrics going down - which in this case is currently ‘% of posts read that a trusted group of users upvote’). The mod team is really crucial here - we want new users, but we want to maintain what makes the Forum great.