This discussion guide contains guidelines for facilitators of the EA Virtual Programs Career Planning Program.

Table of contents:

Guidelines on facilitating career-focused discussions

Facilitating discussions around people’s personal career planning sometimes requires slightly different knowledge than facilitating discussions about EA ideas. Therefore, we think it’s good for you to learn more about how to best go about guiding people on their career-planning journeys, even if you have already facilitated other EA Virtual Programs groups before.

Below are some resources on career consultation that we think are helpful for you to go over before the program starts. Some of these resources are about 1-on-1 career conversations, which are of course different from groups-based career planning discussions, but we think there are enough common lessons relevant to this program that they are worth a read.

We understand facilitators don’t get a lot of training for this program, and might not have done this before. Therefore, we have told participants that your main roles are to serve as a sounding board, offer guidance, and evaluate their reasoning. We do not expect you at act as a career advisor, or have extensive professional networks relevant to participants fields. Instead, we encourage you to view yourself as a peer within the group.

⚠️ Required reading:

• Guide for Conducting Career Consultation (Omer Nevo, EA Israel) (21 mins), especially the following sections:
  • General Principles in Career Advice
  • Appendix A: Suggested Reading
    • Make sure you understand the key concepts explained here.
    • Make sure you are aware of the resources listed here and know when they can be helpful to direct participants.
• Managing group conversations (8 mins) and Facilitation tips (3 mins) (EA Groups Resource Centre) for more general facilitation advice
• If you need a refresher on generic facilitation advice: see the EA VP: Facilitator Guide

Further reading/listening:

Your responsibilities as a facilitator

• Facilitating 5 weekly 1-1.5-hour group discussion sessions.
  • We think that the conversations should probably last for about 1.5 hours, because that has typically worked best for other VP programs. However, we haven't extensively tested this Program yet, so feel free to wrap things up early if you think that's the best use of your time.
• Help research, or share opportunities or ideas with your participants.
  • For more guidelines on where to find these, check out Where to find opportunities and other resources.
• Preparations:
  • Do the weekly readings.
  • Check out our suggestions for how to structure the session an prompts: Session Structure and Prompts. However, as an organising team, we're pretty uncertain about how best to foster impactful conversations, so we'd encourage you not to over-index on these recommendations.
  • Make a copy of this document and encourage the participants in your cohort to fill out their next steps at the end of the session.
  • Respond to the questions and comments of participants in between sessions.
  • If participants request this, give them feedback on their career planning templates.
  • It will probably be wise for you to also do the exercises each week and apply them to your personal career planning. This helps you understand the intricacies of the different career planning steps better and better understand and provide advice on the struggles that participants might experience.

How you can be helpful to participants

First of all, also to this program, generic facilitation advice applies. See the EA VP: Facilitator Guide for this.