(*) indicates this output is complete

indicates output is upcoming

1. A project proposal
2. A literature review
3. Primary Research
1. Conduct a group organisers’ survey
1. A list of career constraints, currently under review
2. Conduct a members’ survey
4. Crowd-sourced write-ups on career products
1. A comprehensive list of Potential Career Advice Products with links to similar efforts, costs, benefits, risks
2. A list of Research Methods for Career Advice Products
3. A list of potential Career Advice Prioritisation Criteria
4. A WIP Guide to High Impact Career Research
5. (Ongoing) Coordinating between people working on career projects and tracking progress
6. Support Service Progress to date
1. Monthly calls since Jan 2019 (Read our meeting minutes here)
2. We helped facilitate the production of EA Israel’s Career Consultation guide.
3. Coordinating org research, developing a guide to evaluating high-impact organisations
7. (April 2020) An updated list of recommended career events for group organisers
1. A list of potential experiments based on our research
8. (April 2020) Summary write-up of the results of our group organiser survey

The following are projects we were considering but did not pursue as of May 2020.

Improving career advice impact tracking and metrics

Status

I am confident that this needs to be worked on for LCAN’s work and any work in this space to be additive and valuable, precise details I am less confident on. Before we do any major project, I at least want a few testable hypotheses for metrics to experiment with. After speaking with Lauren at AAC, I’m more convinced that this is going to be important if I think LCAN is a generally promising idea.

Key requirements of any such system

• Standardization of data collection
• Quick access of data by all parties (CEA/LCAN/Group organisers)
• Relatively short forms with options for more in-depth responses.
• Follow-up

Goals

• 1) Measuring group organisers’ impact on group members’ career trajectories for different events to
• Compare events with the same goals and target audience
• Compare events across local groups
• Data-driven decision-making
• A universal form makes real-time tracking and analysis possible, giving us (relatively) quicker feedback loops
• Consistent data collection
• 80K estimates it’ll take ~2 years to know the impact of an activity. We need to keep this in mind for some activities. Makes it hard since group organisers cycle out fairly frequently. This makes a stronger case for an external feedback system (ideally automated) that can gather this data even if a group organiser leaves.
• 2) Consider how to evaluate LCAN’s impact as well (after 1)

Participant-filled Forms

• Logistics
• Have 1 universal form that group organisers can use to track impact. Results are anonymized but group-level data is available to all group organisers
• Form should have logic based on the goals of the event e.g. career 1-1s and career workshops should not have the same goals, they should not be measured with exactly the same metrics
• Caveat: organisers need to know why they are hosting X or Y event
• Groups can have custom links that pre-fill group name, event etc. It would be really cool if we could sync this data up to the EAGx/etc. Data that’s being collected, but not necessary.
• Follow-up
• Can collect emails anonymously for follow-up feedback (or how it’s done with the EAG forms), in the form can explain why following up is really important.
• Also ask group organisers to send reminder follow-ups, but I think it’s better if this step is automated.

Organiser-filled

• CEA can require all group organisers who have any kind of funding to fill out event forms and ask them to deliver these members the feedback forms (Creating a general events form evaluation is a different task altogether, of course)
• Pre-registering events could be really cool! AAC is doing it. But it needs to be time-efficient and worthwhile for group organisers to do (especially for the entrepreneurial types :P)

Risks

• Hard to get buy-in from all group organisers without CEA
• I don’t think suggesting best practices are going to be very effective here. We will get piecemeal data which is a nightmare to analyse and not very reliable.
• How to adapt the metrics if they change/get updated - this is a general problem though.

Next Steps

• Is CEA on board with such an effort?
• Are group organisers on board? (Quick poll)
• Research existing 1-1 impact tracking amongst group organisers and establish best practices and weaknesses.
• We have a dozen or so organisers we can contact for follow-ups on running 1-1s
• Consult with 80K has created a new metric DIPYs, but we need to make sure it's relevant and good for group organiser contexts. I think their work will be a little less relevant to our tracking because they are niche.
• Consult with AAC