The Nonlinear Library EA - 5 possibly impactful career paths for researchers by CE
Jan 24, 2024
09:42
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 5 possibly impactful career paths for researchers, published by CE on January 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Charity Entrepreneurship is running a second edition of our
Research Training Program (RTP) - a program
designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions.
In this post, we discuss possible long-term career paths for researchers and a gap assessment of what skills people might want to prioritize to pursue those. This discussion may be helpful for people considering the RTP program or those more generally wanting to find other ways of building career capital in research.
These five roles are based on what we think are potential placements or jobs for our first cohort in the RTP. We have made these all a bit more clichéd and separate than they are - in practice, there is a lot of overlap and nuance among them, and a successful research career often involves aspects from all these role types.
These paths can all be exciting for someone who is the right fit. Each of them will inevitably have a high variance in impact, with some low- and some high-impact roles in the mix. Most importantly, we think people tend to forget the vast range of career paths open to someone with strong research skills. In the RTP, we aim to coach participants on what we think would be most cross-applicable between these areas, with a mind to make these positions as impactful as possible.
Beyond these specific roles, it is worth noting that being a proficient researcher can be highly applicable to many other positions that require lots of decision-making, such as leadership and executive roles in high-performing organizations. In this sense, good research skills are all about helping you ask the right questions and find the right answers.
Role: Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) for a High-Impact Organization
Example:
Research and Evaluation Lead at One Acre Fund,
Senior Program Officer/M&E at Gates Foundation,
MEAL Coordinator at Vida Plena)
Mechanism for Impact: This role has an impact by ensuring an organization achieves its goals. Great M&E can often be the difference between highly impactful charities (e.g., GiveWell recommended) and those that are not. M&E helps demonstrate impact, identify pain points, and supervise progress toward stated goals. When done well, it can increase the odds of a charity improving to reach the top of its field.
Our sense is the impact of an M&E role correlates quite strongly with the charity's quality and its interest in M&E. A more junior role in an impactful charity may lead to more impact than a senior role in a much less impactful one. Charities also have very different attitudes toward M&E, where working for an organization that values M&E facilitates the impact of your role, and working for one that doesn't can amount to paper pushing. M&E work is sometimes only used as signaling for fundraising, not to determine if the organization is having an impact or identify potential improvements.
Persona: The type of person who is good at this sort of role is a bit non-conformist and fairly detail-oriented. Enjoying finding flaws or possible areas for improvement ends up being a pretty helpful disposition here. Relative to other research roles, this role is a lot more applied, so it could be a good fit for someone who wants to spend time in the field and create evidence rather than relying on secondary sources. M&E can be a good fit for someone early in their career who wants to leave options open for more direct charity work and theory-based research.
Top skills to build: Although some cause areas (such as global poverty) have a decent pipeline for M&E training (such as the
MIT MicroMasters or specific university courses), other cause areas have virtually ...
Charity Entrepreneurship is running a second edition of our
Research Training Program (RTP) - a program
designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions.
In this post, we discuss possible long-term career paths for researchers and a gap assessment of what skills people might want to prioritize to pursue those. This discussion may be helpful for people considering the RTP program or those more generally wanting to find other ways of building career capital in research.
These five roles are based on what we think are potential placements or jobs for our first cohort in the RTP. We have made these all a bit more clichéd and separate than they are - in practice, there is a lot of overlap and nuance among them, and a successful research career often involves aspects from all these role types.
These paths can all be exciting for someone who is the right fit. Each of them will inevitably have a high variance in impact, with some low- and some high-impact roles in the mix. Most importantly, we think people tend to forget the vast range of career paths open to someone with strong research skills. In the RTP, we aim to coach participants on what we think would be most cross-applicable between these areas, with a mind to make these positions as impactful as possible.
Beyond these specific roles, it is worth noting that being a proficient researcher can be highly applicable to many other positions that require lots of decision-making, such as leadership and executive roles in high-performing organizations. In this sense, good research skills are all about helping you ask the right questions and find the right answers.
Role: Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) for a High-Impact Organization
Example:
Research and Evaluation Lead at One Acre Fund,
Senior Program Officer/M&E at Gates Foundation,
MEAL Coordinator at Vida Plena)
Mechanism for Impact: This role has an impact by ensuring an organization achieves its goals. Great M&E can often be the difference between highly impactful charities (e.g., GiveWell recommended) and those that are not. M&E helps demonstrate impact, identify pain points, and supervise progress toward stated goals. When done well, it can increase the odds of a charity improving to reach the top of its field.
Our sense is the impact of an M&E role correlates quite strongly with the charity's quality and its interest in M&E. A more junior role in an impactful charity may lead to more impact than a senior role in a much less impactful one. Charities also have very different attitudes toward M&E, where working for an organization that values M&E facilitates the impact of your role, and working for one that doesn't can amount to paper pushing. M&E work is sometimes only used as signaling for fundraising, not to determine if the organization is having an impact or identify potential improvements.
Persona: The type of person who is good at this sort of role is a bit non-conformist and fairly detail-oriented. Enjoying finding flaws or possible areas for improvement ends up being a pretty helpful disposition here. Relative to other research roles, this role is a lot more applied, so it could be a good fit for someone who wants to spend time in the field and create evidence rather than relying on secondary sources. M&E can be a good fit for someone early in their career who wants to leave options open for more direct charity work and theory-based research.
Top skills to build: Although some cause areas (such as global poverty) have a decent pipeline for M&E training (such as the
MIT MicroMasters or specific university courses), other cause areas have virtually ...