How to compare two options in terms of career capital
Skills – what will you learn in this job? You can break skills down into transferable skills, knowledge and personality traits.
Some especially useful transferable skills include: personal productivity, analysis and problem‐solving, the ability to learn quickly, communication, data analysis, persuasion and negotiation, and management. If you want to do good, you also need to learn all about the world’s most pressing problems.
You’ll learn fastest in jobs where you receive good mentorship.
Connections – who will you work with and meet in this job? Your connections are how you’ll find opportunities, spread ideas and start new projects. The people you spend time with also shape your character (see section 5 of Appendix 2 for more detail). For both reasons, it’s both important to make connections who are influential and who care about social impact.
Credentials – will this job act as a good signal to future collaborators or employers? Note that we don’t just mean formal credentials like having a law degree, but also your achievements and reputation. If you’re a writer, it’s the quality of your blog. If you’re a coder, it’s your GitHub.
Runway – how much money will you save in this job? Your runway is how long you could comfortably live with no income. It depends on both your savings and how much you could reduce your expenses by. We recommend aiming for at least six months of runway to maintain your financial security.
12‐18 months of runway is even more useful because it gives you the flexibility to make a major career change. It’s usually worth paying down high‐interest debt before donating more than 1% per year or taking a big pay cut for greater impact.
Mistake 2: Not building flexible career capital that will be useful in the future
What type of career capital should you gain?
Earlier we went looked at Kate, who went to work at a non‐
profit. Not only do non‐profit jobs often build your skills more slowly, they’re also less flexible. It’s widely accepted in the non‐
profit sector that it’s easier to switch from a business job to a non‐profit job than vice versa. So if you’re unsure between the two, a business position offers more flexibility.
Another cautionary tale is Chris completed a philosophy PhD, but was unable to get any academic positions that he was excited to pursue, and so had to retrain. We’ve found lots of people start a humanities PhD and then realize they hate academia, and that their PhD won’t help them much elsewhere. They end up feeling like they’ve near‐wasted four years.
Example: Tara trained and worked as a pharmacist with the Red Cross.
Eventually she realized that she could have a greater impact elsewhere, but all the specialized knowledge she learned in pharmacy would no longer be useful. This is common when people choose specialized courses that are only really relevant to one path.
These examples show it’s important not only to gain career capital, but to gain career capital that’s flexible – useful in many different types of jobs – and likely to remain useful in the future. For instance, learning marketing or management is flexible because almost all organizations need these skills, whereas becoming an expert on Kenyan microfinance is not.
Flexibility is important firstly because it’s really hard to know what the future holds. Many of the most in‐demand jobs today, like being a data scientist or growth hacker, didn’t even exist ten years ago. And it seems like the pace of change is going to be even faster in the coming decades.
Thinking of becoming a legal clerk, medical technician, or real estate broker? These jobs might soon be gone. Several decades ago, Chess was held up as an example of something a machine could never do. But in 1997, Kasparov was defeated by the computer program Deep Blue. Back in 2004, two experts in artificial intelligence used truck driving as an example of a job that would be really hard to automate.42 Today, self‐driving cars are already on the road. Back in 2014, Nick Bostrom predicted it would take ten years for a computer to beat the top human player at the ancient Chinese game of Go.43 But it was achieved in March 2016 by Google Deep Mind.
In 2013, two researchers estimated that about half of all jobs are highly at risk of automation within the next twenty years.
The most at‐risk jobs include many “white collar” positions as well as manual jobs.44
42 “The New Division of Labour” by Frank Levy and Richard Murnane (2004).
Chapter 2 is titled “Why People Still Matter”.
43 “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrom (2014).
44 For more information see 80000hours.org/2015/02/which‐careers‐will‐be‐
automated.
The safest jobs are those that involve creativity, high‐level problem‐solving, and social intelligence, such as: management, marketing, social work, and engineering.
Taken from Frey, Carl Benedikt, and Michael A. Osborne, ʺThe future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerization.ʺ Sept 17, 2013.
These technological changes, combined with global markets, are also increasing the rewards for being a top performer in your field. Think of WhatsApp, which has only 55 employees but over 700 million users (as of July 2016). It would never have been possible for such a small number of people to serve so many customers a few decades ago. These changes are not only limited to the technology sector; they’re happening everywhere. JK Rowling became the highest‐earning author of all time because Harry Potter became popular all around the world. These days, people work in a global market rather than a national one. This means the importance of building good career capital is actually increasing over time.
We’ve seen that it’s important to build flexible, future‐proof career capital because the world is changing so fast. But that’s not all. You’re also going to change. Research shows that people’s interests change significantly, and more than they
expect.45 Think about your hobbies ten years ago. They’re probably pretty different today.
You’ll also keep learning more about which career paths are best.
Flexibility is even more important if you care about social impact, because it allows you to focus on whichever problems turn out to be most pressing in the future. In the 1960s, the big issue was nuclear war and hardly anyone had heard about climate change, whereas today climate change is widely seen as the bigger issue.
We’re optimistic that global health will be much improved in twenty years, so it will be less pressing. On the other hand, we expect new problems to be discovered. This means it’s probably better to give yourself the option to switch problem area in the future, even if it slightly reduces your impact in the short run.
In general, the more uncertain you are about the future, the more important it is to gain career capital that’s flexible. One consequence of this is that flexibility is usually most important at the start of your career. At this point you haven’t tried any jobs, so it’s the point when you know the least about what you want to do in the future.
Bear in mind, the advice “build flexible career capital” is not the same as “don’t close any doors”. Some people try to avoid committing to a specific path because they’re unsure what to do. Rather, the advice is to commit to a path in which you’ll gain career capital that’s useful in many other paths. Just pick an area, perform highly, learn transferable skills, and meet
45 Quoidbach, J., Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2013). The End of History Illusion. Science, 339(6115), 96‐98.
influential people. You’ll end up in a better position than if you try to do a bit of everything and don’t achieve anything.