EA - Career advice the Probably Good team would give our younger selves by Probably Good

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: Career advice the Probably Good team would give our younger selves, published by Probably Good on September 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.At Probably Good, our mission is to help more people maximize the impact of their career based on their own values, personal circumstances, and motivations. In the past few months, we've made many exciting strides towards fulfilling this mission - like launching our 1-on-1 advising calls, renovating and rebranding our site, and publishing several new in-depth career profiles and career guide chapters. Though we're still a relatively new org, we're learning a lot and striving to create high-quality content for a range of preferences and cause areas (be on the lookout for a whole lot of climate-focused career content in the next month!).We think this sort of guidance can be extremely helpful in navigating your career search (it's why we do it!). But we also know that life is complex and unpredictable. Planning and strategizing for your career is super important, but so is chance, failure and learning along the way.So to get a bit more personal and strike up some career conversations, our team is sharing the top piece of career advice we'd give our younger selves. We all come from fairly different backgrounds and career stages, so hopefully this can give a more practical perspective on our own career journeys.Anna Beth, WriterShow you can do the work instead of relying solely on on-paper qualifications. When looking for a job out of undergrad, I often wouldn't even apply to ambitious opportunities because I assumed I didn't have the impressive on-paper qualifications needed to stand-out. This probably has something to do with imposter syndrome, but I actually felt pretty confident in my abilities - I just thought I didn't have the background needed to be given a chance. Looking back, this was a pretty defeatist outlook. I wish I would have spent more time focused on practicing and sharing the sort of work I wanted to do. When I eventually started sharing (and emphasizing) a portfolio website with mostly personal writing projects, I ended up getting more interviews and my first full-time role.If you feel limited by your background or like you're somehow behind for not doing more while in school, it can go a long way to show - not just tell - you can do the work. Sure, those prestigious internships and achievements could open doors and give you an extra boost, but ultimately, organizations want people who can actually do a good job and have something valuable to offer. Try a do-it-yourself approach by taking up projects that interest you, keeping up with a website, actively seeking work-tasks, or doing more volunteer work in your field.Dylan, ResearcherYou have more options than you likely realize. We tend to lean towards options we're already familiar with, and the careers we're exposed to at a young age are determined by fairly arbitrary variables like location, educational background, and our parent's careers. I think this means the career goals we form early on are often highly path dependent. In reality, there's far more areas of work we would have been excited about, if only we'd been exposed to them earlier on.This probably sounds quite obvious, but it's something I wish I'd internalized before I latched onto the first subject that gripped me then spent a fair few years pursuing it at postgraduate level. I might still have chosen the same route, but my decision would have been better informed had I spent some more time trying a bunch of different things.Itamar, Head of GrowthEarly on, prioritize broadly applicable skills-like learning and communication-that will be useful regardless of what path you end up taking. This is especially beneficial in cases where you're unsure what you'll do later, or think that ...