Why run a Career Planning Program?
We've developed a programme which centres around the 80,000 Hours career planning course, but aims to improve the user experience compared to students just working through the course on their own.
- It provides an accountability mechanism to do the often difficult and sometimes aversive task of thinking about careers
- It provides a clearer structure and gives people enough time to properly work through each section of the 80,000 Hours course.
- Our program has three separate tracks, designed to be completed one after another. They are Exploring cause areas, Exploring job paths + Finding ways to make a difference, and Next steps and optimising your year.
- Participants can bounce ideas off facilitators and their peers; we've found they often learn usefully from one another
- 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 coworking 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
How to run this program
1. Set-up
2. 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.
3. 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 3 doesn't include presentations, but instead has a collaboration doc. You'll need to make a copy of this and include the right number of participant sections for your group.
