Career Planning Program
Career Planning Program

Career Planning Program

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A program that aims to guide participants through the 80,000 Hours career planning course. It's a 5 week program with 3 separate tracks.

Why run a Career Planning Program?

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Since your main goal will be enabling people to make career decisions based on EA principles, running careers-focused programming might be an important part of your work.

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.

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Why we think the Career Planning Program is better than just doing the 80,000 Hours career planning
  • 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.
  • Participants can bounce ideas off facilitators and their peers; we've found they often learn usefully from one another
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How our Career Planning Program works
  • 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

Duplicate the Notion page Career Planning Program, or copy its contents into whatever format you'd prefer.
We've left some callouts on the page to flag wherever you need to make changes to customise the program for your group.
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Callouts are these little boxes with lightbulbs. You'll want to delete these before you share the page with your participants!
Check all the links in your Career Planning Program copy, to make sure they go to the right place for your group. Add in your own Calendly, where callouts advise you to do so.
Set up an application form. Here is the one we used for the Oxford version of this program.
Advertise the program using your group's usual channels
Reach out individually to group members you think could benefit from the program

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.

4. Run the sessions

Have a look at our , if you haven't already

5. 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.

6. 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
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