Is there a proposed/proven way of coordinating on the prioritization?

Without a good feedback loop I can imagine the majority of the people just jump on the same path which could then run into diminishing returns if there isn’t sufficient capacity.

It would be intersting to see at least the number of people at different career stages on a given path. I assume some data should be available from regular surveys. And maybe also some estimates on the capacity of different paths.

And I assume the career coaching services likely have an even more detailed picture including missing talent/skills/experience that they can utilize for more personalized advice.

Great to hear there’s work in progress on this! Looking forward to it!

Also thanks for the suggestions, will try to get the most out of these!

This is really encouraging, thanks for writing it!

I filled the form and am also planning to apply for CDTF but to be honest I'm pretty uncertain about what the next steps should be in my case. Having a pure tech background (I think I qualify for #1) I find it really hard to navigate the policy space. I'm struggling with questions like which opportunities to apply for, what skills to learn/improve. I think mentoring would also be crucial for transitions like this. Is there also a programe out there to help with that? (Relevant fellowships seem to be flooded with good applicants right now).

Thanks for sharing all these details!

I’d also be interested in CLR’s view on funding and talent constraints. The post says: 

This budget would allow us to hire more researchers

At the same time currently it seems there is a large interest of good candidates for at least the entry level opportunities. E.g. the 2023 summer fellowship:

We were surprised by the high number of good applications this year, meaning that competition was particularly strong.

So is talent constraint a main bottleneck right now and what are the expectations for the coming years? Also if the following rough guidline on Earning to Give on the CRS Career advice page seems appropriate:

we would recommend earning to give if you have the potential to make a lot of money (donating $200,000 per year or more, as a rough guideline)

Would also be interested how it went and if there are plans for a second round.

Thanks for clarifying, I think the arguments makes sense! The FAQ is clear on this and it’s good to see some of it’s background.

I can accept that it’s a tricky situation and the overall best way to handle it is to consider a resign.

Yes, the wellbeing argument still applies even after the paycut if you’re still substantially above the regional minimum. But if you compare it to your original wage, given that you only committed to a barely noticable sacrifice, which the paycut itself likely even surpasses signifficantly, that additional 10% might just be too big of an ask.

However if one is also just fine with earning around the lower wage and even donating from that, then I think considering something like taking the further pledge may also be an interesting idea.

I might be underthinking this but to me the 10% pledge is only about acknowledging that I earn significantly above the minimum wage in the region and hence giving up on 10% will likely not have a significant effect on my wellbeing.

Then for factoring in the tradeoffs related to direct work, a starting point I could think of so far is if funding would be available to cover them. If you think about it, you decided to take a tradeoff to pursue a direct work opportunity. You could have also just kept earning and started donating the difference to a fund. Now imagine someone else comes with a funding application to the same fund. This other project has the exact same expected returns as your direct work project. The only difference is that this other project requires funding. Assume that the amount required is the same as the difference you'd donate. You might see where this goes. The two projects are equivalent from the fund's perspective (for each project to get done the fund is worse off by X money). This means - if I did not mess it up - you taking the tradeoff for the project is at least as good as donating the difference to the fund (assuming the fund would be happy to trade off this amount of money for the project you are doing).

So I'm not sure if taking a tradeoff like this would technically count for the pledge, but I think the result would be at least as good as donating the difference to a given fund. And so far I assumed that this is what matters.

(Note that I also had a likely not too successful attempt of writing up this idea from a different perspective)

Great to hear that there's something in mind. Also thanks for highlighting the difficulties. I definitely wanted to use software for it but if it's not as easy as it first sounds, then I'll just save myself from the struggle and leave it to an experienced person.