Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Consulting Network is now Consultants for Impact, published by Consultants For Impact on May 29, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
After spending the past 5 years advising hundreds of consultants on how to optimize their career and donations for impact, seeding EA workplace groups within McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and beyond, and supporting 30+ career transitions, the EA Consulting Network is evolving into Consultants for Impact. We're excited to continue helping high-impact teams and consulting talent to find each other!
About Consultants for Impact
Since 2019, Consultants for Impact (formerly the Effective Altruism Consulting Network) has been dedicated to supporting current, former, and prospective consultants in strategically optimizing the social impact of their careers.
We do this by:
Prioritizing consultants who are highly committed to impact and are at career inflection points: We identify consultants who we believe are well-placed to have a high-impact career and support them with Career Conversations, introductions, retreats, and curated opportunities.
Inspiring significant action by amplifying those who led by example: We emphasize the importance of high-impact work to business consultants and amplify motivating stories of former consultants engaged in direct work to make less common impact-oriented career paths feel tangible and socially viable.
Connecting consultants to meaningful and analytically driven work: We strive to outcompete other consulting exit-career paths by connecting our members with career opportunities that are more value-aligned than typical business roles and more skill-aligned (problem-solving focused, analytical, fast-paced, etc.) than typical social impact oriented roles.
Why Focus on Consultants?
We believe that business and strategy consultants have an outsized potential for professional impact as a talent pool, as supported by:
Demand for Consulting Skills: We've heard from hiring managers at EA organizations that they are bottlenecked for talent with strong management, strategic, and operational capabilities (i.e. EA Community Survey (MCF 2023), 2019 Talent Gap Survey), skills that consultants disproportionately possess.
Pre-vetted Talent: Strategy consulting is a very competitive field, with a demanding process of business case interviews and sometimes additional tests of decision-making and general intelligence. Firms often have over 100 applicants per place and the largest firms expend significant resources in their recruitment processes.
Desire for Career Changes: The churn in consulting is comparatively high and as such many candidates are eager to identify their next career move after only one or two years in their role. Given the relatively short tenure of the average consultant, Consultants for Impact can leverage the steady stream of trained and talented folks, often a few years out of university, and support them in building longer career paths to impact.
Track Record of Consultants in EA: Many successful senior EAs are former consultants (ex. Habiba Banu, Rob Gledhill, Joan Gass, Zach Robinson, Paige Henchen) and we've already seen our hypothesis validated by the 30+ consultants whose career transitions into high-impact roles we've supported.
Evolution to Consultants for Impact
We are evolving into Consultants for Impact because we believe this new brand will better enable us to achieve our mission. Our new name gives us greater brand independence and control and provides a more professional presentation. It also enhances our capacity to accurately reflect the diverse philosophical frameworks (including, but not exclusively, Effective Altruism) that can benefit our work.
We are excited about this transition and believe it will enable us to better support and inspire consultants dedicated to making a significa...
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