EA - Successif: helping mid-career and senior professionals have impactful careers by ClaireB

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: Successif: helping mid-career and senior professionals have impactful careers, published by ClaireB on June 7, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We’re Successif, we’ve been around for a year, and we’re excited to finally formally introduce ourselves to the EA community. This post will cover who we are, what we have been doing, some lessons learnt in the past year, and how you can contribute to our mission!Executive summary:Successif, previously known as EA Pathfinder and created over a year ago, is an organization designed to support mid-career and senior professionals transition into high-impact work. We adopt a holistic approach focused on cause prioritization, personal fit, and aptitude building. We offer collective workshops, one-on-one mentoring, women leadership workshops, peer support groups, and match-making.In this post, we are sharing the most common bottlenecks mid-career professionals face, what we learnt about giving people permission, and issues specific to women.We are also inviting the community to contribute through referring candidates to our programs, sharing thoughts on our strategy and activities, providing voluntary help, and contributing funds to our new AI program. In a follow-up post, we will present that program.1. Context on SuccessifSuccessif was created in May of 2022 as a result of the belief that there were mid-career and senior professionals aligned with EA values who did not work on EA causes due to lack of information, misconceptions or blockers, and that much expected value would be gained if the community captured these people earlier, especially those who could work on longtermist causes.Further investigation revealed a notable gap: a lack of resources and programs tailored to support mid-career and senior professionals in addressing the world’s most urgent problems. For instance, 80,000 Hours’ materials often cater mostly to young individuals, leaving an important segment underserved. To fill this gap, EA Pathfinder—the predecessor to Successif—was launched in 2022. Since then, we have rebranded and refined our strategy accordingly.Successif’s core mission is to create a world in which professionals motivated by evidence and reason can find high impact work. Focusing on mid-career and senior professionals leverages unique expertise, skills, and experience to address pressing global issues and fill certain skills gaps in the high-impact talent pipeline.We recognize that our audience has specific needs, blockers, and concerns when it comes to transitioning to high-impact work, especially when the work is in a different field. We provide coaching, upskilling through training programs, networking opportunities, and matches with relevant opportunities. More fundamentally, we take a human-centered approach, helping mentees navigate the uncertainties that accompany career transitions. We help address feelings of discouragement from uncertain outcomes and overcome psychological barriers preventing them from being their most impactful professional self.We work in six core areas: Technical AI Safety and AI Governance, Biorisk Prevention, Nuclear Arms Risk Prevention, Climate Change, Animal Welfare, and Global Health and Development. We have launched a specific track for AI jobs, which we will cover in a subsequent post.2. What we doA. Our approachOur approach to career advising is based on the ikigai model and on the aptitudes framework.Ikigai Model“Ikigai (き, lit. 'a reason for being'): Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living.” When it comes to career advising, the Ikigai model offers valuable insights and guidance for career advising. It empowers us to effectively help our advisees discover what is at the intersection of what they love, what they’re good at, w...