Thank you for writing this beautiful piece! It really touched me. I am sad to admit I wasn’t even aware, there seems to be so many atrocities that consistently happen to animals it’s hard to keep up. Thank you for taking the time to write, acknowledge and inspire others!

On point 9-this is something we really are aware of at AAC and would love your take on it. As far as I know I think with career advising both AAC and 80k will discuss a number of opportunities with individuals some of which are more competitive and some of which are less competitive. The biggest issue is with job board that attract a lot of traffic here we are trying to direct people very strongly towards the highest impact opportunities, however the trade off here is these opportunities are few, highly competitive and low absorbency. We are considering to expand the job board to include more opportunities that can absorb more people and still have some impact but there is a strong concern we may therefore direct talented people away from higher impact opportunities due to them being on our website. I think it’s a valid point but I do think that 1:1 tailored career advising or mentorship should minimise this risk, with a strong focus on the needs of the individual and their chances to realistically get the jobs discussed.

so 9 placements each on 3 months FTE but most are part time for 6 months

3 months FTE, thanks for spotting 

Hi James,

Thanks for your questions and engagement with our post.

<<Besides the predictions you had for various amounts of people attending the online course, reading the skills profiles, etc., did you have any more high-level targets such as "we want to support X number of people in choosing a better career for animals"?>>

Yes, ultimately we will want to measure some variant of impact adjusted career trajectory changes for individuals. We haven't tried to really measure this for the skills profiles as these were largely for helping us to get a better knowledge internally on different types of roles in the movement. The online course and the 1-2-1 career advising will be assessed at least in part by our randomised control trials which will look to measure both career changes and also some behavioural changes of individuals who participated in the intervention vs. those who didn't. 

<<Looking at Appendix A, I saw you were disappointed with the amount of people who said they were likely to change their likely career trajectory, which is definitely understandable. Have you got plans to research into and/or improve this figure or do you not consider it a pressing issue at this stage?>>

Correct, although this is very immediate responses and its likely there could be more positive results in a few months or even years. At this stage digging deeper isnt the priority right now until we become more optimistic about continuing this service, but this might change when we receive the results from our RCT's on both the 1-2-1 advising and online course.

<< Would you be willing to share your cost-effectiveness calculations you reference in Appendix C? I'm considering starting a start-up later this year and would love to see how other people have modelled it, especially for an intervention that is seemingly quite hard to model rigorously.>> 

Absolutely,  although we must caveat that these are very rough CEA's and you might get some better advice on this from Karolina from Charity Entrepreneruship. If you email Jamie@animaladvocacycareers.org, he'll be happy to share this with you. Also if you want to chat more broadly about your start-up ideas and have a chat about this feel free to reach out to me. 

Lauren 

Great post and thanks for sharing, 

<<Paying for courses. Instead, perhaps someone could take on doing the leg work to work out which courses in some important arena is best, and then secure funding for EAs to do those. >> 

I guess we (AAC) did try this with our Management and Leadership training for EAA organisations this year, although potentially we didn't do deep research into the available courses. We did spend some time prioritising based partially on academic research which ones we thought could be the most beneficial. 

I think for us a major failure point was more due to what you pointed out here:

"A problem that's even worse for mission driven organisations than others is that object-level work always seems more urgent and important than self-development." Some feedback we had from the management and leadership training we provided this year was that even though initially participants were bought in and excited to participate some failed to complete the course due to a lack of prioritization on their part (i think its great that our participants were so transparent about this)  not due to the suggested course content not being valuable.  It's possible however this was also due to our implementation, if we do this again we will try to approach the training differently by working with a smaller number of organisations and try to get more buy-in from leadership for example get them to allocate a certain number of hours to this training for the individual. 

I think a challenge is that the value of taking the course might not be quantifiable to the individual or the organisation. So even if you find a course that could be helpful to develop a key skill, how can you measure the benefit to both the individual and the organisation of the person taking the training vs. them spending time on an object-level project. Would be grateful if you had any insight on this.   

<<I’m therefore keen for EAs to do more brief write ups of specific things they’ve learned and how - say, what they found most useful in learning how to write well. Of course, sharing them publicly (like on this forum!) is especially useful. But even writing suggestions up quickly and sharing them with colleagues can be really helpful - my colleague Brenton is particularly great at noticing things he’s learned and quickly writing them up for others to benefit from>>

Would also be really keen on this, it could be a great way for people to self-improve on certain topics. 

<<Systematising mentorship>> 

I think Kathryn from WANBAM has done an excellent job in facilitating this and matching individuals well but i imagine to do it well it's also very time-consuming for the person facilitating. 

Anyway, loved reading this post so thanks for writing it up.

Lauren

Is there any one thing you think that EAA and AA organisations can focus on or should focus on which would significantly improve the impactfulness of the movement as a whole?

Alot of EAA focus in regards to resource seem to be on more developed countries like USA and UK leaving many other countries neglected despite the fact that they also have high meat consumption e.g. China, India, South Africa etc. What do you think are the most effective ways we can try to expand the movement internationally. Do you think this should be tackled by existing EAA organisations or new localised organisations?

Also thank you for agreeing to do this talk!

Hey Kyle, sorry for the delay.

It's great that you are considering this career and i hope we can support you more on this journey, part of the problem at the moment is we aren't confident in knowing how people should prepare for this career most effectively. This is why we are trialling a number of things this year to make better informed decisions in the future.

We should be offering some form of assistance to individuals later this year in regards to research and advise on what skills could be useful to develop or also training so i would advise you signed up for our newsletter and up to date with what we are doing in case you find it useful in future. In regards to remotely this is unknown at this point but we aim to be as accessible as possible.

@michael Sorry my initial reply didn't seem to go through on this.

Unfortunately this was just a preliminary study looking to identify which skills were needed by the majority and we didn't go into greater granularity than prioritising skill sets individuals could have which would benefit both the individual organisations and secondly the animal movement as a whole (the later is where the majority voted for economist skill set) and the inference was for breadth in economics.

It does look like Samara answered in more detail below on how it can be beneficial.

We will be continuing the survey and publishing full results approx 1 month later. From here should economics be a priority skill set we will look to do deeper research and hopefully i will have more details for you. Is there a specific reason for your question and perhaps i can be more helpful in future?