My impact-focused career: you can create your own roles (?)

This is a post about my impact-focused career journey, with a few tentative, interrelated lessons drawn out:

1. Unofficial work gets you hired
2. Even if an organisation has a need, they don’t always advertise it
3. You can create your own roles

More on those below. But first, some context.

I’m Jamie Harris, the Courses Project Lead at The Centre for Effective Altruism, where I lead a team running online programs that inspire and empower talented people to explore the best ways they can help others. That’s my full-time role.

I also have two extremely part-time/spare-time commitments. I’m a Fund Manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund, which aims to increase the impact of projects using the principles of effective altruism by improving their access to talent, capital, and knowledge. And I’m President of Leaf, a nonprofit that supports exceptional teenagers in exploring how they can best save lives, help others, or change the course of history.

I’ve previously worked as a teacher, a researcher at the think tank Sentience Institute, and as a co-founder and researcher at Animal Advocacy Careers, which helps people maximize their positive impact for animals. I was also a Program Associate at Macroscopic Ventures, a grantmaker focused on reducing s-risks—risks of astronomical suffering in the long-term future.

Why am I sharing this?

1. People asked me on a career-focused program I piloted recently about my own journey. I get similar requests occasionally at Effective Altruism Global conferences. So I am following the principle that if you explain something twice, write it down, so others can access it and it saves you time.
2. This is Career Conversations Week, and I wanted to follow Toby’s prompts to share knowledge about careers that we may have latent in our brains but haven’t shared.
3. Thirdly, I’m personally trying out some casual ways of sharing info on the EA Forum without letting “perfect be the enemy of good”—not taking too long to get something out. (I’m also doing another post, co-written with a writer/editor, to try another approach.)

I have recorded a ~45 minute info-dump video/audio about my career journey—a kind of case study full of qualitative data, where you can see for yourself whatever lessons emerge.

But here are three, tentative, interconnected lessons that I think my career journey suggests, which may be surprising to some people:

1. Unofficial work gets you hired
   1. A former colleague, Sofia, wrote a great EA Forum post about “How Unofficial Work Gets You Hired.” It demonstrates how doing things independently, unpaid, related to top problems or your target career path can open doors. I think my story supports this.
   2. I landed my first role in a high-impact nonprofit partly because I was running a local EA group (Effective Animal Altruism London), writing a research blog, and volunteering for effective animal advocacy orgs while working full-time as a teacher. That built a relevant track record, even without formal experience.
   3. The nonprofit I ran pretty much solo for three years—Leaf—started with me advising the founder, unpaid, before the opportunity opened up for me to work on it myself.
   4. My grantmaking role at Macroscopic Ventures stemmed partly from an optional capstone project I did in the Center on Long-Term Risk’s s-risk introduction fellowship.
2. Even if an organisation has a need, they don’t always (have time to) advertise it
   1. Of the 7, proper paid roles I’ve had, only 2 have actually been directly through a hiring round (my first full-time paid job, as a teacher, and my first ‘EA’ job, at Sentience Institute).
   2. 2 more were variations on a public hiring round (co-founding Animal Advocacy Careers after being offered a space on the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program but not taking it; my current role at the Centre for Effective Altruism ending up as different to the publicly advertised role).
   3. The other 3 had no public hiring round at all (Managing Director of Leaf, Program Associate at Macroscopic Ventures, Fund Manager at EA Infrastructure Fund).
   4. There were also 3 paid opportunities that ended up being small or temporary (that might otherwise have evolved into full-time work) that did not have a hiring round (contract work at Non-Trivial, cFactual, and especially briefly 80,000 Hours).
   5. There were also numerous public rounds that I applied for and was rejected from (including EA Funds and CEA where I later ended up working!), and a few other roles I applied to and was offered but did not take.
   6. Some of these unadvertised roles came from “unofficial work” that opened doors; others came more from successes in adjacent, full-time roles or other factors; some came from a combination.
3. You can create your own roles.
   1. The competing offer I had to my first impact-focused/’EA’ role was a role that I had pitched to the co-founder of the organisation after learning about effective animal advocacy strategy, meeting him, and discussing. (I didn’t take it, though they later took on someone else for the role.)
   2. The role I took at Macroscopic Ventures emerged after conversations with them where I noticed more of a gap/need in a different area to what they initially reached out to me about.
   3. Much of my work (and income!) to date has been at nonprofits I co-founded or led.
   4. These weren’t pre-scoped opportunities—I spotted or shaped them (always in collaboration with other people though, never solely off my own back).

Some caveats on the rest of the info dump if you listen to the full video or skim the transcript:

• I present it as a narrative, which might imply causal links between events even when not intended. I won’t always mention other underlying factors, like:
  • Skills I’ve developed
  • Innate traits
  • I had a privileged upbringing, went to a good school in the UK, had supportive parents, and got a first-class degree from Oxford. That helped with my first role and, likely, some subsequent ones.
• I’m not saying this is the ideal career strategy or that I always made the right decisions. It’s just one real-life example—a case study you may or may not learn from.

You could stop reading now; I’ve already shared most of the key insights, I think. But here’s the full info dump! You can watch the video if you like the look of my face, just listen to the audio if you don’t, or skim the (AI-generated, not fully accurate) transcript, all at this link. (Skip to 7:53 if you want to skip a verbal repeat of the above!)