đ§Just getting started? Guides and Courses
The following resources are longer-form content, designed to cover almost everything related to career planning. They are ideal if you arenât sure where to start. Nonetheless, seasoned job-seekers can still find plenty of valuable information here too! We recommend skimming through the sections listed below and diving deeper into anything that is more relevant to you.
The 80,000 Hours Career Guide aims to cover the most important basic concepts in career planning in 12 parts.
- Part 1 is about what to look for in a fulfilling job longer term - we recommend everyone read this part:Â What makes for a dream job?
- Part 2 - 6 are about which options are most impactful for the world - we recommend reading these parts to anyone who is uncertain about where to focus their career.
- Part 7 - 10 cover how to find the best option for you and invest in your skills - we recommend these parts to those who roughly know what they want to do (e.g. animal advocacy work), but arenât quite sure where to start. If this sounds like you, we believe that Part 6 is a great read for you too.
- Part 11 - 12 cover how to take action and launch your dream career - we recommend everyone read these parts.
Occasionally, EA Virtual Programs offers (free) Online Courses to go through the career guide in a small group and with a facilitator! Keep an eye out for them here.
The articles and career planning template on this page are designed to help you make the best possible decisions in planning out your career.Theyâre in-depth and based on the best academic research and existing advice we could find. And weâve tested and refined the advice in them over the years by advising over 1,000 people one-on-one.
Follow the links below to make great career decisions, review your progress, and create a career plan you feel confident in.
If youâre already familiar with the ideas in our career guide, this series aims to deepen your understanding of how to increase the impact of your career.Browse through the titles below, and read whichever interests you. Hereâs a reminder about what our advice is based on and some tips on how to best use it.
We think their website describes it best!
This course is perfect for animal advocates like you who want to make a real difference for animals, especially using your career. Whether you're at the beginning of your advocacy journey or simply looking to boost your current path, we believe that by the end of the course: - Discover exciting career options that can make a real impact for animals and bring you personal satisfaction. - Craft your own career plan designed to maximise your positive impact for animals. - Gain actionable clarity on your next steps to put your career plan into motion. - Join a community of change-makers âconnect, share, and collaborate with like-minded advocates worldwide.
This career guide was developed to help you figure out what careers would be best for you, while taking your social impact into account.
We recommend reading the whole guide (as we do with all the guides), but it is also smoothly separated in three sections, which roughly correlate to three different stages in career planning:
They also have a core advice series which you could finish in ~40 minutes! Check it out here.
The Impact Accelerator Program, similarly to the EA VP Career Planning Program, is a cohort-based program in which you learn everything you need to start the next stage in your career path with a small group and a facilitator! Make sure to send an Expression of Interest to stay up-to-date on when the next round is happening!
Who should apply? We are looking for motivated, results-driven, experienced professionals who aspire to maximize their impact and would appreciate guidance in navigating the path to achieving it. We expect that youâd get the most value out of the program if you are a mid-career or senior professional not currently working at an EA-aligned organization, and you've spent some time thinking about how you can do the most good but have not yet taken many significant steps in that direction.
đ©âđŹUnsure where you fit? Personal Fit and Skill-Building
These resources will help you narrow down your choices and build the necessary skills to succeed in your career. Some of the resources here are part of the guides and courses listed above - but there is no harm in revisiting them!
General Insights into different Careers
Here are a few ways to get an overview of what kind of positions there are in the animal advocacy movement and how they look like:
Job Boards đ
Scanning job boards can help you understand the variety of positions, skills, and experiences needed in the animal advocacy space. By reviewing various job listings, you'll get a sense of the qualifications required to land these roles.
Explore our list of job boards here!
"How I Learned to Love Shrimp" Podcast đ§
Amy and James interview professionals from different sectors of animal advocacy. These conversations provide valuable insights into various career paths, challenges, and the day-to-day responsibilities of advocates working in the field.
Listen to the podcasts here!
TĂ€list Alternative Protein Resources đ§Ș
TĂ€list offers an event series where industry professionals in the Alternative Protein sector share their experiences. These sessions are especially valuable for job seekers exploring roles in this growing field. You'll learn about education tracks, career journeys, and industry trends, followed by a Q&A session.
They also host a podcast, "Cultivating Careers in Alternative Proteins," featuring in-depth conversations with professionals in roles ranging from food safety specialists to entrepreneurs in the alternative protein space.
Job Profiles on the Effective Altruism Forum đĄ
The EA Forum features around 50 job profiles where individuals share their career experiences. Reading through these profiles offers an inside look at the day-to-day aspects of different jobs in the animal advocacy movement, helping you understand the scope and variety of roles.
Read the job profiles on the EA Forum here!
Personal Fit
Why itâs important to test your personal fit
[Adapted from 80,000 Hours article on Personal Fit and Job Satisfaction]
Everyone says itâs important to find a job youâre good at, but no one tells you how.
The standard advice is to think about it for weeks and weeks until you âdiscover your talent.â To help, career advisers give you quizzes about your interests and preferences.
But as shown in this article, becoming really good at most things takes decades of practice. So to a large degree, your abilities are built rather than âdiscovered.â
Asking âWhat am I good at?â needlessly narrows your options. Itâs better to ask: âWhat could I become good at?â
That aside, the bigger problem is that these methods arenât reliable. Plenty of research shows that while itâs possible to predict what youâll be good at ahead of time, itâs difficult. Just âgoing with your gutâ is particularly unreliable, and it turns out career tests donât work very well either.
Similarly, research shows that although self-reflection is useful, it only goes so far.
You can probably think of times in your own life when you were excited about a holiday or party â but when it actually happened, it was just OK. In the last few decades, research has shown that this is common:
This means we canât just trust our intuitions; we need a more systematic way of working out which job is best for us.
(You can learn more about Job Satisfaction here, note that this is slightly different from Personal Fit, i.e., whether you will be able to become good at a certain position, whereby being good is not only one of six factors to predict job satisfaction, but also very important from an impact perspective.)
How to test your personal fit
Here are some great general resources on testing your personal fit:
You can also test your fit for a specific career path, such as the most talent-constrained positions, by looking into some of these resources:
Position specific resources
Animal Advocacy Careers has Skill Profiles on some of the most impactful opportunities in Animal Advocacy! They are a great place to start testing your personal fit on, as they provide you a glimpse of what the position is like, what kinds of skills are needed, how to go about building said skills and much more! Check them out:
80,000 Hours isnât solely focused on farmed animal welfare and their reviews are more broadly applicable, which, depending on your current situation, might just be an upside!
They have Career Reviews, many of which can be applied to animal advocacy, which largely go over the impact one could have, but also include âHow to assess your fitâ and âHow to enter this fieldâ sections!
They also have Skill Profiles which go deeper into testing your fit for certain skillsets!
Probably Good covers several careers that neither of the above cover! Their profiles also have sections on âIs it a good fit for you?â and âStrategies & next stepsâ.
Here are some more valuable resources we found!
Animal Advocacy Careers has published dozens of blog posts exploring careers in animal law and a full guide on the topic!
This is not a typical test of personal fit, but given the enormous funding constraint in farmed animal advocacy, earning to give might be a particularly promising path! Here are some articles for you to read to learn more about the idea, advantages, constraints and downsides of earning to give:
Current talent constraints
If you are not already laser-focused on one particular career path, you might want to seek out less travelled paths to test your personal fit! One way to pursue this is to test your fit for positions that are particularly talent-constrained. If it turns out that you are in fact a great fit for these roles, not only will you have to worry less about competition, you are also more likely to make a larger counterfactual impact!
These talents seem to be particularly constrained right now:
According to the latest AAC Survey:
- Executive Leadership and Strategy: CEOs, Executive Directors, and Board Members
- Fundraising and Development: Fundraisers, grant writers, and development officers
- Campaigns and Stakeholder Engagement: Designing and implementing campaigns, engaging with stakeholders, and building corporate partnerships
- Operational and Team Management: Department heads, project managers, and team leaders
- Policy, Legal Affairs, and Advocacy: Lawyers, policy analysts, and advocacy specialists working to influence public or legislative change
According to the Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum 2024:
- Government and policy and/or lobbying experts
- Management
- Fundraising
- Campaigners
- Experts on the developing world or specific neglected, but populous countries
đ Ready to start job hunting? Job Boards and Job Hunting
Job Boards
Impact-focused â
These Job boards are curated to only include jobs that are particularly impactful:
The Animal Advocacy Careers Job Board includes jobs in animal welfare across highly impact-focused animal nonprofit organisations:
We list roles at the organisations where we expect that the role has an unusually high impact potential for animals. We do not vet the organisations ourselves but include a column noting whether and how the organisations have been reviewed by Animal Charity Evaluators, whose evaluation criteria include cost-effectiveness and culture.Some organisations that have never been reviewed by ACE are included because theyâve been found to be promising by grant-makers focused on finding the best opportunities to help animals, such as Open Philanthropy or the EA Animal Welfare Fund. And some others are included because they seem unusually focused on this goal, such as organisations that conduct research into the most effective animal advocacy tactics. For any organisation included in our systematic searches, we list all their roles and update the job board every two weeks (usually on Mondays). So if youâre looking for roles at those organisations, you can be confident that you wonât miss out on opportunities there. We usually have 100 or more roles on the board at any one time, from a wide variety of countries. We also accept requests to list roles, if a few criteria are met; with only a few exceptions for unusually promising other types of work, all included roles focus primarily on helping farmed animals, which tends to be the most cost-effective way to help animals.
80,000 Hours is a job board for effective altruism organisations. These organisations are focused on solving the worldâs most pressing problems in the most effective way possible. Although they promote roles across different causes, they have a number of roles specific to animal welfare. Many of the same roles and organisations are listed here and on Animal Advocacy Careersâ job board, with a roughly similar number of postings.
A continuously updated, curated list of high-impact jobs for people who want to make a difference. (Lots of overlap with the Animal Advocacy Careers and 80,000 hours job boards.)
Probably the widest known vegan job board. They are a global vegan job and resume hub operated by vegans for vegans and plant based / vegan-oriented businesses and organisations. Itâs free both for candidates and organisations. In this job board, youâre most likely to find open positions at vegan start-ups and companies, but they also have vacant positions at animal nonprofits.
There are usually hundreds or even thousands of roles listed here. The vegan jobs board relies on organisations manually posting each of their jobs, so it's only comprehensive for any particular organisation if they are diligent in posting every role to the most relevant job boards (which many of them are, of course!).
The board requires that each posting business âoffers only vegan products/services,â which isnât a strict requirement for some of the other job boards weâve listed in this post. But thereâs no requirement or filtering for the organisation being particularly impactful for animals.
The EA Opportunity board features everything short of permanent positions. They regularly monitor and collect a wide range of opportunities, including internships, volunteer opportunities, conferences, and more. They want to be the go-to board for people interested in exploring what they can do within the effective altruism community. Most of the opportunities featured are within EA organizations and initiatives, but they also feature entry-level opportunities from other organizations working on the most pressing problems. You can filter the board for animal welfare, as well as Routes to Impact, Opportunity Types, Relevant Aptitudes and Location.
The AIM job board features jobs from impact-focused organizations launched by graduates of AIMâs (previously Charity Entrepeneurship) programs.
Alternative Protein Jobs
The TĂ€list Job Board focuses on jobs within the alternative protein space. There are thousands of jobs listed which you can filter for Location & Remote policy, Job Attributes, and Organisation Attributes.
This job board is all about careers in the alternative protein space. They include positions in organisations that are driving alternative protein innovation and are looking for motivated, creative and enthusiastic people to join their teams. Itâs a great place to check for relevant and potentially impactful opportunities, but since it relies on organisations submitting the roles themselves, it doesnât cover all the promising job opportunities in the animal product alternatives space. We recommend that you also follow specific companies that you are excited about from GFIâs company database or the Protein Directory.
Vevolutionâs Job Board focuses on jobs at vegan businesses. They are a global movement that joins together plant-based and cellular agriculture innovators from around the world â where entrepreneurs, emerging startups and investors come together. As such, in this job board, youâre most likely to find jobs related to plant-based and cellular agriculture, especially in vegan start-ups. Organisations need to pay to list their roles here.
More Job Boards
Itâs probably not wise to follow too many job boards at the same time. However, if the above are not enough/in your interest, here are all the other veganism/animal-advocacy related job boards we could find:
Looking for a job, career, internship, clerkship or fellowship in animal law?
The Animal Legal Defense Fund offers a list of current employment opportunities plus additional opportunities at various law firms and non-profit organizations across the country.
If you are a law firm or non-profit organizations, you can submit your opportunity and [ALDF] will consider it for publication.
Collections of different vegan job sites to help you find your next career opportunity.
A company that provides services to support vegan business owners and entrepreneurs. They include a job board on their website as part of their services (for free). Vegan Mainstreamsâ job board includes a wide range of animal jobs, including in vegan businesses and nonprofit organisations. When we wrote this article, there were 42 jobs on the board, over half of which were at PETA. Other organisations had some but not all of their roles listed.
Promotes sustainable and vegan jobs, as well as internships. They only include a few listings but also link to a number of other job boards you might find useful.
Jobs specific to VegNews. Not posted anywhere else on the internet.
Talent Databases
You can enter your details in these databases and have the employers find you!
High Impact Professionals has a Talent Directory for promising candidates interested in high impact career paths! Here is their sign up form.
Find talent seeking generalist part- or full-time work within the next 6 months.
Resources on Job Hunting
Here are some resources on Job Hunting that we found particularly valuable!
How to find a job
- How to get a job (topic archive), in particular
- All the best advice we could find on how to get a job â
- How to network (from 2015, partially outdated)
- Creative EA job hunting: things you can do in addition to filling out job applications â
- Advice for early-career people seeking jobs in EA â
- What I wish I knew when I started out in animal advocacy â
- How to Get an EA-aligned Job: My Experience
- When in doubt, apply*
- Donât think, just apply! (usually)
- Advice I've Found Helpful as I Apply to EAÂ Jobs
đ€Need personalized support? 1-1 Advice
The following organisations offer 1:1 career advice! We recommend applying to each of them in order to maximize your chances of receiving advice and ideally gaining different perspectives:
Whether you're looking to kickstart your career in animal advocacy, navigate a change, or accelerate your growth, this is your chance to get personalised guidance from our team. đ Why Apply? â Tailored advice to align with your goals â Insider tips for job applications â Strategies to overcome career obstacles Just one hour of expert advice can be what you've been waiting for. Donât miss this opportunity to shape your future!
Animal Policy Careers provides direct support from policy experts to help you identify the most promising policy career paths.
The animal policy careers program is run by Spencer Orenstein, a former congressional staffer with more than a decade of experience working on Capitol Hill and at DC think tanks. The policy careers program is also supported by other experienced political advocates, current staffers and former staffers.Mobius' Policy Careers Program can help you integrate into the policy ecosystem. We want to help you test your fit in a policy role, connect you with opportunities and resources, and gain the knowledge, skills, and network needed to create real, lasting change in animal welfare and food systems.
80,000 Hours
Whether youâre changing careers, just starting out, or are already on an impactful path but have questions or uncertainties, our advisors are here to help. Hereâs what we can do on the free 1:1 call: - Review your options - Make Introductions - Suggest Next Career Steps
Who can we help? Our advising program is geared toward people who want to have a meaningful impact with their careers. We talk with students who are open to exploring a broad range of career paths and with seasoned professionals seeking impactful projects that could use their expertise. Some people come into advising sessions with set plans and strong intuitions about their career, while others come in with broad questions and a lot of uncertainty. Our goal is to meet you where youâre at and equip you with whatever is needed to move forward in finding a career that can meaningfully impact the world.
đĄLooking for more insights? Further resources
Many of the resources in this page are taken from the following three organizations. Broadly speaking, each of these organisations and their pages have their own specialities but also include resources that are valuable to most people aiming for a career (in animal advocacy). We strongly recommend checking them out!
We strongly recommend Animal Advocacy Careers as your go-to place to learn more about how to best use your career to advocate for animals! Some of our favourite resources include their:
80,000 Hours
80,000 Hours is the most established career organisations that prioritize impact. They are not specialized in animal advocacy but have a ton of general career/impact resources that are widely applicable. Some of our favourite resources include their:
Probably Good is a fairly new career organisation that prioritizes impact. Even though they are relatively new, they already have some very valuable resources, such as:
Additionally, if you are interested in alternative proteins, we strongly recommend you to keep an eye out on TĂ€list!