Earlier this year I reviewed my career. It was okay.

This post explains my 2023 career review - How I'm figuring out what I value in my work, what I am good at, and what my options are.

Summary

Earlier this year, I did a career review! This is a post that explains what I did and the conclusions, and next steps I decided on. My actual plans have been moving quite quickly alongside my writing this post, but I wanted to share it now in the hope that it’s valuable for others thinking about their career too!

Key points from my career review:

• Career reviewing is hard and I still have uncertainties, particularly about what options I have and what the most ambitious things I could be doing are (or if I’m being too ambitious…)

• I have thought a bunch about my values, strengths and options - this has been really helpful (but is still a work in progress).

• I am now trying to explore my options in more detail, while applying for jobs/funding that seem good from my current perspective. This is so far mostly focused on operations management and running entrepeneurial projects.

• I want your feedback on my plan - let me know if you think I am missing out good options, or if you think I’m confused about something! (and send me any opportunities that you think would be a good fit for me!)

• My overarching goal is to lead a fulfilling life, and I want to stay open about what this might mean, and what my specific values are. That said, this likely means continuing to get good at a widely applicable set of skills that I enjoy using, and looking for projects that help others a lot, in teams that feels like a community.

Very short summary of what I’m looking for:

• I want to be doing good work to achieve something important, in a supportive, high-trust team.

• I am most excited day-to-day, by strategic thinking; coaching; playing with cool data; providing active assistance to people in my org, or network; talking about philosophy and psychology; and building and improving operational systems.

• I am mostly concerned with the issues of: global catastrophic risk - particularly that posed by emerging technology (e.g. AI) and large scale suffering (e.g. factory farming).

Background: I have often found reviewing my career hard

8 years ago - I watched this TEDx talk by Ben Todd from 80,000 hours. In the talk Ben explains how putting altruism, as opposed to “passion” at the heart of your career decisions can lead to a more fulfilling life.

When I heard this message back in 2015 it made me feel nauseous. I cared a lot about helping others, and I wanted a job that would help me do that, but I really had no idea how. I barely even knew how to get a job. Since graduation I had applied for over 100 jobs and had found it really hard to get interviews. I really couldn’t bear the idea of adding the additional constraint of “being impactful” to my job search. I mostly forgot about that talk.

A few years later, when I moved to London and became more actively involved in Effective Altruism, I still found the career ideas challenging. That community talks a lot about having a positive impact with your career. But at that time, while I was working in my first job in the Civil Service, I saw my donations to charity as the main way I can help others. And after years of working in low wage, mostly manual jobs I felt grateful to have a job that paid above the national average, and was interesting.

At that point, at the age of 28, I had never really looked at my career in depth. I had no clear idea what I was good at, or even what I wanted in much detail. I really felt like I had no control over where I was heading.

Later that year I got involved in what would become a project I would eventually run, helping civil servants plan their careers (Impactful Government Careers). It was only when I first got involved in that project, that I started trying to think carefully about my career. It was still really hard and aversive though. I didn’t have a great sense of what I wanted or what I was good at, or how to find a fulfilling job.

I have done a career review a few times since then (around once every 2 years), and it’s got better each time. The rest of this post is the result of the review I did earlier this year. The reason for me prefacing with the above story is to highlight that this has been hard. I struggled to even look at my career in the beginning and only really felt like I had a degree of control in the past few years. 

Background: My career so far 

I don’t go into my specific career history in too much detail this post, but wanted to briefly summarise where I’ve come from. If you want to see professionalised versions of this, my CV is here and my LinkedIn is here, but in summary, I:

1. Went to school

2. Went to sixth form

3. Studied biochemistry and population genetics for 4 years

4. Struggled to get any job for about a year post-graduation, did some part-time work in a café

5. Volunteered and then got offered a job in Hospital lab - mostly processing medical samples

6. Quit the lab to travel around Australia for a year. I worked on several farms, waited in an Italian restaurant, and did a personal data analysis project looking at the risk of death on different types of road (which I published here).

7. Came back to the UK, got a job as a data analyst in an education consultancy

8. Moved to London and joined the Civil Service as a statistician in the Department for Education. I also became involved in a project helping civil servants plan impactful careers.

9. Stayed in the Civil Service, got promoted a few times, and moved to the Cabinet Office where I ran several cross-government data governance projects.

10. Went on career break to work on career advising for civil servants full-time.

11. Did a career review and decided not to go back to the Civil Service at the end of my career break (April 2023).

12. Wrote this post.

To put this list into perspective - the career bit of my life visualisation is highlighted below (I wrote about how to visualise your life here).

Career review: What is the point of a career

When I first started thinking about my career I saw my two main values as:

• feeling good

• helping others feel good

This was pointing in the right direction but wasn't the most helpful framing. “Feel good” was simplistic, and unhelpful for making actual decisions. The model also made it unclear how I was going to think about what to do when “me feeling good” and “helping others” came into conflict. (in an attempt to resolve this, at one point I created a selfishness index for myself - so I could just commit to specific level of selfishness - this also wasn’t helpful)

I now prefer to think of it more like this:

Now my goal is about living a fulfilling life, with other values being the driver of that. The values in the orange boxes are things I can discover about myself. There are more of them than listed here, and I might be wrong about a few of these. There is still conflict between values, but now it’s clear that the whole challenge is in figuring out how to balance these values. I am trying to be in the roles of both a scientist, building and testing hypotheses about what it is that I actually value, and also the role of a mediator, carefully balancing the weight given to each of these values.

Note - a lot seems to rest on the definition of “fulfilling” here, but I like it *because* it’s vaguer than “feels good” (which seems unhelpfully hedonistic/simplistic). “Fulfilling” is pointing to the fact that I can value a lot of things (e.g. growth) which, when I am making decisions, don’t seem like they are about my own good feelings. And although I do put weight on “motivational hedonism” (the idea that all motivation is ultimately reducible to in-the-moment positive or negative feelings), that framing doesn’t seem super useful for actual decision making as a human.

Values: I figured out what I want in a job

Below is my current best guess at what I want from a career or job. This is based on a doing a few things:

• Reflecting on, and writing about, times I have felt good or bad about work and why.

• Looking at summaries of what people in general want (I like self determination theory and 80K’s work on this here)

• Brainstorming a long list of things I value, and asking “why do I value this?”, many times. I then filtered/combined the things on that list to select the most important career-relevant values.

What I value:

Capability - I am able to do the job well and feel a sense of personal excellence and strength. I feel like I can’t be easily replaced.

Autonomy - I have a reasonable degree of control over what I do.

Community - Spend time on a mostly daily basis, with people who I trust, respect, feel understood by and who support each other with good communication.

Impact - I am contributing to an important project that is moving the world towards a future that I value, and I can’t see other vastly more meaningful projects that I could be doing (i.e. this feeling is relative to my sense of the options). I want to really believe in a theory of change that connects my individual tasks to the world really being better. (more specific exploration of what I mean by impact later)

Work-life balance - I want to spend time with friends, relaxing and doing other types of work. So I probably don't want to work much more than 40 hours a week and have a strong preference for high flexibility - i.e. starting an hour early/late, working into the evening. Generally being trusted to use my time well etc.

Money - I want enough to live comfortably in London, and to feel like I am not being underpaid.

Prestige - I want to be valued and respected by my colleagues and to feel proud of what I am doing when I tell people what I do. (I expect this to largely be downstream of purpose and capability)

Personal growth There are three types of growth I’m looking for - General, specific and self-knowledge.

• General = increase in my network, and generalist skills such as management, communication, and strategy.

• Specific = this depends on the career path, but I want to feel like I am growing towards becoming an expert in something

• Self-knowledge = I want future career reviews to be easier because any role I get gives me information about what I am good at (this is much easier if I am part of a team that is high trust and gives good feedback).

But these aren’t all as important as each other and some are harder to find than others. So I have tried to estimate importance and rarity to help me prioritise these values.  Below is a graph of these. In my job search, I want to focus my prioritise values that are important, but less easy to find. This means for me: community, impact and personal growth

Note: the “how easy” axis will vary a tonne depending what path I am looking at. This is just my first pass at visualising this across many possible paths.

Impact: What impact do I want to have?

This section is going to be much briefer than it could be. I have been involved in Effective Altruism for a while and thought a tonne about what impact means to me and what the biggest problems in the world are. But I’m not going to write up all my reasoning. Instead - here’s just the conclusions - a list of some of the key global projects I want to contribute to if I can:

• Reducing the risk of everyone (or most people) dying: (e.g. from misaligned AI, or global nuclear war)

• Reducing the risk of powerful entities monopolising global power in a way that prevents future flourishing or causes lots of suffering (this could also be due to AI, or could be a group of humans with a decisive technological advantage). 

• Reducing the suffering of creatures now and in the future: I am particularly concerned about animals on factory farms, this seems like one of the most obviously moral catastrophes taking place right now. I’m also very concerned about the possibility that we will create conscious machines that will then suffer a lot (see here, and here or watch Black Mirror). 

  • Note: I am not philosophically “suffering focussed” - I don’t think suffering is special or that it is in principle more important than positive experiences, but empirically - it seems like we live in a world where there is just a lot of extreme and preventable suffering, but not as much extreme or creatable bliss.

Note - the main way I expect to help with all of these is through something fairly meta - that close up might look a lot more like “making society, or important groups in society, more compassionate and rational” - help others see the world more clearly and help them understand and feel motivated to help others in directions like the above (or help others do this... (or help others do that etc…)).

I don’t have a very specific theory of change for how I will help any of the above. I need to decide separately for each possible project/role, if I think it’s genuinely contributing to the above.

Strengths: I think I am good at a lot of things and very good at a few things

This bit of my review was the hardest. Looking at my strengths and weaknesses can be painful and confusing. Here’s what I did:

• Collated past feedback and looked for patterns

• Did a few “strengths” tests - e.g. this one and this one

• Explicitly asked for feedback from a wide range of friends and colleagues 

  • I wrote about my attempts at getting lots of feedback here:

To target my ongoing search, I needed to also think about how useful my skills seem to be in the job market - this is very relative to where I am searching, so will change a lot, but as an indication of this, I charted it below, along with how strong I feel I am at that strength.

Note: the “how useful” axis will vary a tonne depending what path I am looking at. This is just my first pass at visualising this across many possible paths.

I made a long list of options

Next I made a long list of options that seem like they might fit with my strengths, values, and experience. 

Long list:

• Researcher of some kind, this could be lots of things - e.g.:

  • Policy research, research, or research management, 

  • Academic

  • Generalist research in, e.g. a think tank

  • Things I’d like to research if someone could pay me to do it:

    • Philosophical psychology (the psychological impacts of humans trying to do philosophy) 

    • Organisational political psychology (e.g. moral mazes, but in government)

    • Fundamental research (e.g. What actually is suffering?)

    • Group dynamics

    • Abstraction psychology (i.e. what does it feel like to do abstraction and de-abstraction, what are the limits of human abstraction, how does this relate to the limits of empathy?)

    • Digital sentience (Or consciousness more broadly)

• Manager, ops’y person or chief of staff - i.e. helping an org that is doing cool work - do that work better.

  • E.g. aligning strategy/delivery, managing people,  building internal systems, managing events and finances

• Chief data officer or data leader in a tech org or start-up/charity

• Other civil servant roles - e.g. technical expert or senior civil servant (probably analysis or analysis adjacent rather than policy)

• Low-effort spreadsheet guy (this is the answer to the question: “what would I do if I only cared about money and work-life balance”)

• Writer (part of me really wants to just write about my feelings and also draw diagrams about the feelings)

• Clown (I wanted to be a clown as a child - there must have been a reason this appealed to me)

• Entrepreneurship - this includes a lot of possibilities for starting new projects, for profit or charitable (this is high risk across a lot of my values).

  • Some examples of project ideas that excite me here.

• Field building in an important area that is relatively under-built (e.g. AI governance or digital sentience)

• Run a retreat centre

• Buddhist monk

• Consultant of some kind 

  • Strategy consultant

  • Data visualisation consultant

  • Life systematisation consultant (e.g. help people do things like this)

• Advocacy work (e.g  digital minds advocacy or small minds advocacy (i.e. animals))

Ranking the options and identifying uncertainties

After making the long list of options above, I then rated these based on values that I have in my career. You can see these ratings below. The key point was that I created a weighted average (e.g. social impact is weighted higher than prestige) and then sorted them based on that average. The weights are loosely based on the graph of values I created above.

My ranked career options (some key uncertainties are highlighted in orange):

The things that came out top were operations management roles and entrepreneurship, but there are still some uncertainties.

Addressing the uncertainties - next steps and exploration plan

Great - so given all of the above - what next? Here’s the plan:

• Just apply to cool jobs from the options at the top of my list, as they come up (e.g. cool operations management jobs)

  • This usually doesn’t take long and is often the best way to learn about job fit

  • I need to figure out how to find these jobs

• Talk to lots of people about possible project and job ideas - get ideas and find potential co-founders. Talk to possible mentors or people whose work I admire.

• Try a bunch of “cheap tests” in the areas where I am most uncertain - often this will look like talking to a person, but could also just involve applying for a job if the application process is relatively straight forward.

  • Example of important uncertainties from the above include:

    • Ops personal growth - main question - what do I actually want to get good at here? I am good at the data stuff, but what else could I specialise in?

    • Entrepreneurship capability - how good a fit for building projects am I?

    • Research capability - is trying research really a good idea for me at this stage?

• Attempt to embrace an “Opportunity abundance mindset” - there will be jobs - there will be projects!

• If and when I do get a new role - I want to make sure I set key reflection days in advance, 1-3 months in. I want to look back at this review and see if the role is in line with my values.

And finally - I want to make my career decisions in the open - e.g. post these plans online, ask for feedback, encourage people to give me their opinions and make it clear that I need help with this (noticing that I have a habit of doing this too little was actually one of the key things I learnt from my feedback gathering). So if you have any thoughts about the above then I’d love to hear them!

PS: A bunch of friends talked to me about, and inputted on, these and earlier plans - I massively appreciate this. I’d be even more confused without your help. Thank you!