AI Safety Career Coaching (Intro + Recurring)

Seeking a top-up grant to prioritize AI Safety Career Coaching.

Project Details

Project summary

Hi! I'm Jen. I'm a former Product Operations Manager at Google, who left to take a sabbatical and transition into dedicating my labor towards making sure AI goes well for humanity. I've been involved with EA since 2021 through EA Chicago and EA NYC; in addition to co-leading EA@Alphabet, and now EA SF. I want to dedicate my career towards suffering alleviation.

I have an existing Manifund grant open, but this one is to get ecosystem validation and increase my capacity beyond part-time to address this specific project: AIS Career Coaching.

I am seeking a 3 month top-up (July-Sept) to dedicate 10-15 additional hours/week to my budding AIS Career Coaching Program - to build out proper infrastructure (talent directory, headhunting, talent referrals, branding), post more regularly on Linkedin or other channels for reach, increase capacity to take intro calls and properly onboard a few clients for recurring accountability & direction, and most importantly, active outreach.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

AI Safety Career Coaching (Intro + Recurring) (50%+)

I learned to filter out individuals who lack context to focus more on people in the ecosystem. Some types of advisees:

individuals who have been constantly getting rejected from certain fellowships or roles and don't know why, but continue to apply
mid-career professionals who are sincerely interested in AIS but don't know how their PM role translates in the AIS ecosystem
talent in-between programs or courses who are inundated by the endless resources online and don't know where to go for their next step

I've received consistent unprompted feedback on helpfulness.

Some results within the month:

2 headhunt connections leading to speed running a potential candidate,
experienced professional partook in the Breaking Barriers Hackathon + introduced to EA UK,
~5+ new attributed applicants to BlueDot,
[unknown #] applicants to Successif, BlueDot advising, 80k advising, Steadrise, HIP, CEA Bootcamp
Ops candidate reached the late interview stages for a role - results tbd,
another sr. professional attended Manifest to network within AIS,
One applied to Surplus.dev
~2 new members introduced to AIS Founders community
5 warm introductions: to experienced AIS researcher, Biosecurity community member, and AIS Operations professional, AI policy transitioner

In partnership with BlueDot & Mox, I am coordinating & organizing a 2-part event series in July for AIS Field-Building:

- Breaking Barriers Hackathon SF
- AIS Career Fair & Founders Summit

Let's say 20% of the attendees are new to AIS, but interested & need support beyond BlueDot. That is around 40 people --> 10% of whom might become promising recurring clients (defined: high priority profile need).

Without this grant, I will just KTLO my existing support with no active outreach:

people reach out to me regularly & I offer ~1 day/week, full day slots for 15min coaching.
I got ~150+ new connection requests who I have not followed up with.
I have ~3-4 promising talent who I keep in touch adhoc with opportunities.
I'll continue to send people to other inundated one-off advising programs.

My vision for high-need talent recurring coaching:

Biweekly check ins on their progress, make consistent introductions to get their name out in the field, active iteration of rejections or feedback.

Theory of Impact

As someone who used to work in Big Tech with some virality/branding as an AI Safety Mobilizer, I am uniquely positioned to influence a set of talent outside the reach of traditional EA/AIS.

The pipeline isn't short on interested people, it's short on placed people. Experienced professionals with genuinely relevant skills (ops, PM, policy, engineering) are bouncing off fellowships, misreading the landscape, or giving up before they land somewhere they can contribute.

Recurring 1:1 coaching addresses this at the highest-leverage point: the transition itself. By helping mid-career and pivoting professionals get placed into high-impact roles faster (and stay in the field long enough to compound), the project increases the effective labor supply working on x-risk reduction: technical safety, governance, ops at safety-focused orgs, and adjacent field-building. A single successful placement of a senior professional into a safety-relevant role likely dwarfs the cost of the entire coaching program.

People

Jen Baik

Team Member

Grants Received

Add grant

Coefficient Giving Career Transition GrantAmount hidden

from Coefficient Giving

$****

Funding Asks

grantmaking.ai Launch Round

Applied

Minimum

$5,000

Ideal

$10,000

What this ask is

Project summary

I have an existing Manifund grant open, but this one is to get ecosystem validation and increase my capacity beyond part-time to address this specific project: AIS Career Coaching.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

AI Safety Career Coaching (Intro + Recurring) (50%+)

After a semi-viral Linkedin post, I coached 32+ professionals in the month of June varying in range of background and stages of the AIS journey (Initial Analysis EA Forum post). I’ve collated a larger directory of ~50 professionals who are interested in AIS.

I learned to filter out individuals who lack context to focus more on people in the ecosystem. Some types of advisees:

individuals who have been constantly getting rejected from certain fellowships or roles and don't know why, but continue to apply
mid-career professionals who are sincerely interested in AIS but don't know how their PM role translates in the AIS ecosystem
talent in-between programs or courses who are inundated by the endless resources online and don't know where to go for their next step

I've received consistent unprompted feedback on helpfulness.

Some results within the month:

2 headhunt connections leading to speed running a potential candidate,
experienced professional partook in the Breaking Barriers Hackathon + introduced to EA UK,
~5+ new attributed applicants to BlueDot,
[unknown #] applicants to Successif, BlueDot advising, 80k advising, Steadrise, HIP, CEA Bootcamp
Ops candidate reached the late interview stages for a role - results tbd,
another sr. professional attended Manifest to network within AIS,
One applied to Surplus.dev
~2 new members introduced to AIS Founders community
5 warm introductions: to experienced AIS researcher, Biosecurity community member, and AIS Operations professional, AI policy transitioner

In partnership with BlueDot & Mox, I am coordinating & organizing a 2-part event series in July for AIS Field-Building:

- Breaking Barriers Hackathon SF
- AIS Career Fair & Founders Summit

Without this grant, I will just KTLO my existing support with no active outreach:

people reach out to me regularly & I offer ~1 day/week, full day slots for 15min coaching.
I got ~150+ new connection requests who I have not followed up with.
I have ~3-4 promising talent who I keep in touch adhoc with opportunities.
I'll continue to send people to other inundated one-off advising programs.

My vision for high-need talent recurring coaching:

Biweekly check ins on their progress, make consistent introductions to get their name out in the field, active iteration of rejections or feedback.

How the money will be spent

This is a top-up grant to incentivize me to get ecosystem validation and build out a proper pipeline to pilot this talent program.

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