Career planning program

Last updated: 4th October, 2023

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Sections

1. How our Career Planning Program works

This is a 5-week program with 3 separate tracts that aims to guide participants through the 80,000 Hours career planning course.
Weekly 1 hour long meetings with a small group and a facilitator.
The program lasts for 5 weeks.
There are 3 separate tracks that run simultaneously. If a person were to do each of the 3 tracks one-after-another it would take 15 weeks (3 x 5 weeks).
The 1st session of the 5 weeks is group co-working to fill out the relevant workbook for that track.
The 'homework' that participants do in between sessions is to investigate a cause area, longer-term path, or to complete an action step that is relevant to them.
The remaining 4 out of 5 sessions are spent in group discussion. Each week, each participant delivers an informal 5-10 minute presentation on the cause area or long-term path that they have investigated.

a. Set-up

Set up an application form. Here is an example from EA Virtual Program’s career planning program that you can copy.
Advertise the program using your group's usual channels.
Reach out individually to group members you think could benefit from the program.

b. Familiarise yourself with the workbooks

In each track there is a separate workbook.
The participants will need to submit their workbooks to you for you to leave comments after the first session of the program.
You can create a Google or Airtable form that allows participants to submit their form to you. See our template here.
Alternatively, you can just ask them to email the workbook to you when they're done.
Make sure to ask participants to change sharing settings on their workbook so that you can leave comments.

c. Prepare the templates

Tracks 1 and 2 have a presentation template, which participants can use to create their presentations that they will do each week. Familiarise yourself with them:
Track 1 template
Track 2 template

d. Run the sessions

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Further information here

e. Collect feedback

Create feedback forms to collect your participants' experiences, then put a link to the forms in the Notion pages for each track. Here's the Oxford version.
(Optional) Conduct 'exit interviews' with all participants. This is useful, but not necessary if you can't invest the time.

f. Follow-up

Set a reminder to check back in with participants some time after they've completed the program.
For Track 3 participants, check in 6 months later.
For Track 1 and 2 participants, check in next semester, or whenever you next run the program, to see if they want to participate in the next track.

Cause areas. First: we recommend people explore the arguments and cases for various cause areas that they might not know much about.
Longer term paths. Second: if you have a rough idea of what causes you prioritise, you'll explore long term job paths for how you personally might contribute and actually make a difference on those cause areas.
Next steps. Third: you can plan out the next career-related steps you want to take now and over the next year. We recommend doing this after you have an idea of what long term job paths you might be aiming for, and after you've done cause area exploration.