The Nonlinear Library EA - Writing about my job: Operations Specialist by Jess Smith
Mar 12, 2024
10:12
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: Writing about my job: Operations Specialist, published by Jess Smith on March 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
In the spirit of
Aaron Gertler's post about writing about your job on the forum, and to help promote the
people and business ops roles 80k is currently hiring for, I decided to write about my job as an Operations Specialist at 80,000 Hours. (I'm currently spending ~35% of my time in a chief of staff role, but this post just focuses on the ops specialist part, which I spend the rest of my time on, and did full time for the first ~year I was at 80k).
This post aims to give a picture of what my role looks like and how I approach it - ops roles are super varied and this post just aims to represent my experience, so you should take everything with a pinch of salt.
This post might be especially useful for people who:
Are interested in exploring ops roles (particularly the ones at 80k)
Are fairly early in their career
I don't really touch on the impact I think I'm having in my role here, so if you're looking for this you might want to check out
80k's operations management career review instead. I also really liked
Jonathan Michel's botec about the impact of his office manager role at Trajan House, even though this is a different kind of ops role to mine.
My background
Before joining 80k, I had a medium amount of experience with EA: I was involved in my uni's EA group, was on the committee of the One For the World chapter there, and read a bunch of EA things.
During my undergrad, most of my time when I wasn't studying was spent playing badminton and volunteering on the badminton club committee. This helped me get my first full time role role:
After graduating, I was elected as the Athletic Union President at my university - a full-time, student representative role which involved a bunch of ops-style work like marketing, policy writing, budgeting, and event organisation to support student sport in St Andrews. You can read about how I used this role to test my fit for ops roles, and what that was like, in an 80k newsletter I wrote
here.
During my year as athletic union president, I applied to lots of ops (and some comms) roles at EA organisations, as well as some civil service roles. Around May 2022, I applied to the Ops Specialist role at 80k, and started the job in July 2022.
What is my ops specialist role like?
My ops specialist role is closer to the people ops role described
here - involving responsibilities like maintaining our HR systems, running social events, and helping with hiring rounds. When I joined 80k, it was a fairly open question what my areas of responsibility would be - we experimented with a few different things as the year went on.
The broad strokes of my role include identifying problems and trying to fix them, helping to run the behind-the-scenes system which makes life easier for other team members, and project managing larger events and projects.
But, to get more concrete, here's a list of some of my ongoing responsibilities and projects that I've worked on:
Ongoing responsibilities:
Checking staff expenses and annual leave
Onboarding new staff and offboarding staff who leave
Coordinating with EV Ops on HR systems
Helping to write and project managing our quarterly supporter update
Updating the 'about' pages of our website
Organising and promoting team socials
Troubleshooting problems, like "what scale makes sense for our feedback round?" or "what's going on with pensions?"
Contributing to the ops team (like reviewing other team members' work or helping with quality assurance)
(Previous) responding to emails which come in to our info@ inbox
(Previous) organising food and logistics for team events
Projects:
Running our team retreat - finding a venue, organising logistics like transport and catering, choosing and facilitating social act...
In the spirit of
Aaron Gertler's post about writing about your job on the forum, and to help promote the
people and business ops roles 80k is currently hiring for, I decided to write about my job as an Operations Specialist at 80,000 Hours. (I'm currently spending ~35% of my time in a chief of staff role, but this post just focuses on the ops specialist part, which I spend the rest of my time on, and did full time for the first ~year I was at 80k).
This post aims to give a picture of what my role looks like and how I approach it - ops roles are super varied and this post just aims to represent my experience, so you should take everything with a pinch of salt.
This post might be especially useful for people who:
Are interested in exploring ops roles (particularly the ones at 80k)
Are fairly early in their career
I don't really touch on the impact I think I'm having in my role here, so if you're looking for this you might want to check out
80k's operations management career review instead. I also really liked
Jonathan Michel's botec about the impact of his office manager role at Trajan House, even though this is a different kind of ops role to mine.
My background
Before joining 80k, I had a medium amount of experience with EA: I was involved in my uni's EA group, was on the committee of the One For the World chapter there, and read a bunch of EA things.
During my undergrad, most of my time when I wasn't studying was spent playing badminton and volunteering on the badminton club committee. This helped me get my first full time role role:
After graduating, I was elected as the Athletic Union President at my university - a full-time, student representative role which involved a bunch of ops-style work like marketing, policy writing, budgeting, and event organisation to support student sport in St Andrews. You can read about how I used this role to test my fit for ops roles, and what that was like, in an 80k newsletter I wrote
here.
During my year as athletic union president, I applied to lots of ops (and some comms) roles at EA organisations, as well as some civil service roles. Around May 2022, I applied to the Ops Specialist role at 80k, and started the job in July 2022.
What is my ops specialist role like?
My ops specialist role is closer to the people ops role described
here - involving responsibilities like maintaining our HR systems, running social events, and helping with hiring rounds. When I joined 80k, it was a fairly open question what my areas of responsibility would be - we experimented with a few different things as the year went on.
The broad strokes of my role include identifying problems and trying to fix them, helping to run the behind-the-scenes system which makes life easier for other team members, and project managing larger events and projects.
But, to get more concrete, here's a list of some of my ongoing responsibilities and projects that I've worked on:
Ongoing responsibilities:
Checking staff expenses and annual leave
Onboarding new staff and offboarding staff who leave
Coordinating with EV Ops on HR systems
Helping to write and project managing our quarterly supporter update
Updating the 'about' pages of our website
Organising and promoting team socials
Troubleshooting problems, like "what scale makes sense for our feedback round?" or "what's going on with pensions?"
Contributing to the ops team (like reviewing other team members' work or helping with quality assurance)
(Previous) responding to emails which come in to our info@ inbox
(Previous) organising food and logistics for team events
Projects:
Running our team retreat - finding a venue, organising logistics like transport and catering, choosing and facilitating social act...