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How to set up a career advising system for your local EA group
17 min readFeb 13, 2024
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Or at least, how we did it at EA Finland. You probably need to modify the approach according to your group’s situation.
Our career advising service started running in this structured format in May 2022 and has been slowly growing ever since.
Your career advising does not need to compete with 80 000 hours or Probably Good (or Animal Advocacy Careers or any other cause area specific career advising service). It is probably best understood as a complementary service, and this is how we thought about it at EA Finland as well.
We have some advantages which might lead people to contact us instead of any of the other organizations:
Career advising can also be a way for local new people to get interested in EA, in addition to intro programs and other newcomer-friendly activities.
Ultimately, we believe that most people don’t spend enough time planning their career, so most efforts that go to supporting altruistically motivated people to reflect more on their career plans are probably a good use of volunteer time.
We wanted EA Finland’s career advising to be a service where altruistically motivated people get compassionate help in thinking about their career choices in a structural way with the help of volunteers who are equipped to help them by their knowledge of EA tools and frameworks.
This means our services are open to everyone who is interested in doing good, regardless of their agreement of EA principles - but we are open about coming from an EA background ourselves and being able to help better if the advisees are more in agreement with us. For example, if someone is mostly motivated to help Finnish children be healthier, we can try to help come up with personal career steps to make this happen, but we won’t have that much information on eg. the effectiveness of different organizations working on that.
Some people in our advising team have felt we should in some cases try to “talk people over” to a more EA-like prioritizing, because from an utilitarian point of view it is valuable to have more people spend their time on the most effective causes. I however think being a trusted service that people safely can come to with their own values and ways of thinking is too valuable to be traded against the quite limited possibility of persuading someone to a huge change in their values. We do direct people to EA materials but they can decide themselves what they think about them.
I started setting up our career advising system when EA Finland got its first funding, starting in May 2022. This allowed me to work 1 day / week for the organization, with a focus on career advising. Most of the necessary set-up to actually start advertising our career advising services was ready after a couple of months (corresponding to 2–3 weeks of full-time work). Then I spent the rest of the funded months iteratively developing the service, on other career-advising related things, and on other community building things.
It helped to have someone who can actually dedicate time to think about how to run the service – I think we would be worse off if the whole set-up had been done on pure volunteer work. At the same time, we knew that we might not get continued funding, and that I personally might not be able to continue doing paid community building work. [1]
This is why one important design principle was to make up a system that can be run on volunteer-basis only and that can easily be handed over for others to manage. I didn’t want a set-up that works by having me doing all the advising calls, or otherwise would depend on me personally to a large extent.
Another reason to emphasize the role of volunteers was that we didn’t want paid employees to take over volunteer roles but to make volunteering easier, thus amplifying our organization’s impact. Of course this was only possible since I knew we had many motivated volunteers interested in giving career advice.
The career advising training sessions were open to all interested EA Finland volunteers. In addition to the people I organized the training for, there were some individuals who had advising experience from other sources, and with whom I only talked through the principles of our advising system, but didn’t make them practice advising in the same way as the less experienced advisors. As a result, EA Finland currently has 13 people available for giving advising sessions.
There are some benefits in having many advisors:
There are also some downsides on having many vs. few advisors:
We are countering the learning aspect by asking people to share a couple of sentences of how their advising session went after each session in a group chat where all advisors are present.
Most of our volunteers went through a 1-day training organized on a weekend day. The training has a theoretical and a practical part.
The theoretical part includes stuff like:
The practical part, which I think is the most important part, is trying to give advice to a “practice advisee” on the spot. This works in the following way:
I recommend having 2 different practice advisees if you can just find volunteers for this exercise. It shows how different things work for different people, and that no two advising sessions are the same.
Currently, our career advising system is maintained completely by volunteers – that is, we can take in advising requests and give advising sessions completely on a volunteer basis when needed. However, it has been valuable that Vesa Hautala has been able to spent paid work hours for occasionally helping with maintenance (in addition to other career activity related responsibilities, mostly related to development) and that both he and Karla Still has been able to do advising calls on work time when needed.
We have one volunteer whose only responsibility is to follow the sign-up form and redirect the advisees to advisors based on their application form answers. The advisors are responsible for making sure they are actually available or if they aren’t they need to decline the request to give advice. If they accept, they contact the advisee themselves, decide on a time, have the session and log the session in our logging sheet. Afterwards, they share something about their experience in the advisor group chat, so that we can learn from the experiences of others.
People usually find us
The last two groups are quite likely (my estimate is 30%) to never answer the scheduling email, even if they have taken the time to fill in the application form, which is not trivial although not super heavy either. We have a policy of contacting them 2 times, after which we drop it. On the other hand, we don’t have almost any last minute cancellations, so when we actually manage to schedule a call, our advisees tend to show up.
We currently have more capacity than advisees, so it seems clear that advertising (and maybe also interest) is a bottleneck. Things we have done to get more attention to our services:
We’ve been a bit wary of trying a very broad outreach to people who haven’t heard of EA before, because if advisees have a very different understanding from “doing good” than us, we are also less likely to be able to help them.
Aside from various advertising strategies, we sometimes try to develop the advisors’ skills in advising. Part of this is also just upkeep to ensure advisors stay motivated and learn from each others’ experiences.
Doing advising helps us identify spots where we’d need more knowledge to help our advisees better. For example, not many of our advisors know a lot about effective ways to fight climate change, but it is a common area of interest for our advisees. We have tried to counter this by sharing information and just generally being open about our weak spots to each other.
We are also experimenting with additional training for advisors, but it is often hard to get many advisors to attend at the same time. In this sense asynchronous communication seems to work better for us.
But other than that, I think a career advising system can be valuable for many groups. I believe students are perfectly able to provide career advice to others, especially other students, since even without in-depth knowledge of different career situations you can help others by giving them space to reflect and asking clarifying questions.
The most scary part in giving advice is the fear of giving unhelpful or straight up wrong advice, especially to people who are quite young or otherwise uncertain about their situation but put a lot of value on EA type of thinking. I’m afraid they put too much weight into “EA career advice”, while it’s actually just me, a normal person trying to give advice to them. I try to mitigate this by being very open about my own uncertainties, and sometimes I explicitly say that there are no secret EA truths, and even if the career advising comes under the EA Finland “brand” it still represents my personal knowledge and understanding.
Another difficulty falls almost in the opposite direction: it’s the complexity of keeping up with the difference between my personal opinions, some opinions popular in EA materials and the advisees opinions in the context of an advisee who is relatively new to EA. The typical example here is a recent intro program graduate who has heard that AI safety is an important topic and would like to explore it further. I want to be open about the fact that I personally have significant uncertainty regarding AI safety, but I also want to encourage people to read more about it and form their own opinions. However, just stating this can sometimes confuse advisees, and I worry about both discouraging them from getting more interested in AI safety and seeming dishonest with my own views on the topic.
Estimating how people actually like our career advising is sometimes difficult, because we don’t get almost any negative feedback, even if probably not all advisees largely benefit from the advising session. We both collect informal feedback by just asking advisees how they felt after a session and also ask for structured feedback by sending them an anonymous feedback form and lately also another follow-up form after 6 months.
I guess most people get a lot of benefits from just taking 45 minutes or 1 hour to think about their careers and discuss it with somebody, almost regardless of the advising quality level (unless the advisor says something upsetting or discouraging).
Some people we have advised seemed really excited towards the end of the session and said things like “this is the best career advice I’ve ever gotten” and “this was way more helpful than the advice I received at [university / public career services / etc]”. Culturally, these kinds of reactions are not expected in Finland, so I think these feelings are genuine.
This is obviously flattering but also kind of alarming with regards to those other non-EA career advising services. I am not a trained psychologist or educator of any kind, much less with expertise in career guidance, so by default I would expect people who are motivated to try out many different services to get the best service from someone with the right education and who gives career advice as their full-time job.
On the other hand, anecdotally, it seems many people also don’t benefit from public/university career advising services at all. In some ways, our job is easier and more tailored towards our audience. We don’t have to offer advice to people in all kinds of situations (even if we really rarely turn down requests in practice), and in each session, we already know that both the advisor and advisee share the passion for doing good. This gives us a common point of focus even if we’d have very different views on the best ways of doing good.
Or “what I think might be the thing making us different from other career advising options”. This is more a description of the mindset I find useful for giving career advice than a list of concrete tips. For a very good introduction of concrete tips and timing, see this post. The mindset as described in the post is similar to what I use.
First of all, I always trust the person seeking advice to be the expert of their own situation. I often start the sessions by outright stating something like: “I don’t know that much about your field of study/work, could you explain typical options for a person in your situation to me”:
I try to identify points of uncertainty and hopefully figure out ways to get more information to reduce uncertainty:
I generally try to be encouraging and reassuring:
In a nutshell, I just try to listen to the advisee, make sense of what they are telling me and try to find out what they are actually seeking advice for. Often this is enough to figure out some reasonable next steps.
I hope some of you found this post informative or inspiring, especially if you have been considering setting up a career advising service for your local group (or just trying to give out career advice to group members in a less structured setting).
To get started with that, I would probably just start by
If you have any questions or would just like to talk things through, you can always contact me by a EA forum message or by e-mail ([email protected]). I will try to help you.
Career advising can be really rewarding. It is one of my favorite volunteering formats: I get to focus completely on a person trying to solve important problems for them, and sometimes really help them with that. If this is something you think you’d enjoy, I really recommend giving it a try.
And I indeed did quit after 8 months due to finding another full-time job. Since careers is still a core function of EA Finland, Vesa Hautala took over the paid employee responsibility for that after me. From this month onwards, however, we will only have one part-time employee, Karla Still, so shifting over responsibilities to volunteers has become even more important.
Executive summary: The post outlines how EA Finland set up a career advising system for their members using volunteer advisors. It provides insights into their motivation, process, training, and lessons learned.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
A pretty good summary, but to clarify point 3: we had "external" volunteers (who are not deeply involved with EA) taking the role of practice advisees, a method I find more realistic than the volunter advisors in training roleplaying as advisees themselves.