From “Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices About Giving Back” by William Macaskill
There are a number of ways in which a given job can help you have a larger impact later on in life. Through your initial work, you develop “career capital” – skills, a network, and credentials – which will help you take a higher-impact job later on. If you develop organizational skills, then all other things being equal, you will be more effective in your next job. If you get to know a larger number of people through your work, you are more likely to be connected with job opportunities. If you work at a high-prestige firm like Google or McKinsey & Company, that line on your resume will make you more attractive to future potential employers.
In addition to career capital, there are two other ways in which your initial job will affect the impact you have later on in your career. First is how well it keeps your options open. It’s easier, for example, to transition from the for-profit sector to the nonprofit sector than vice versa. Similarly, it’s easier to transition from academia into industry than it is the other way around; for people who are highly uncertain about whether they want to leave academia after their PhD, this asymmetry provides a reason for staying in academia until they have better information. Keeping your options open also provides a reason for building transferable skills – such as sales and marketing, leadership, project management, business knowledge, social skills, personal initiative, and work ethic – rather than highly specific skills, like piano tuning or knowledge of the shipping industry.
Second, there is “exploration value”: How much do you learn about what careers you should choose in the future in the course of doing the job? Especially when you’re just starting out, you won’t know much about what opportunities are out there and which will fit you best. Your first few jobs will give you valuable information that will inform your later decisions. This can provide a reason in favor of trying things that are less well-known to you at first. Perhaps, after college, you have a good understanding of what pursuing a master’s and a PhD would involve, but you have very little understanding of the for-profit world, both in terms of how much you’d enjoy it and in terms of how well you’d fit there. Exploration value provides a reason in favor of working in the for-profit sector for a year of two: you might discover that the opportunities there suit you well.
People embarking on their careers often neglect these considerations. People often tend to think of choosing a career as an all-or-nothing proposition: a one-off life decision that you make at age twenty-one and that you can’t change later. A way to combat this mistake is to think of career decisions like an entrepreneur would think about starting a company. In both career choice and entrepreneurship, you start out with a tiny amount of relevant information, but you have to use that information to cope with a huge number of variables. Moreover, as things progress, these variables shift: you’re constantly gaining new information; and new, often entirely unexpected, opportunities and problems arise. Because of this, armchair reasoning about what will and won’t happen isn’t very useful.