Designing Your Next Steps

Two readings:

How Unofficial Work Gets You Hired: Building Your Surface Area for Serendipity | 2025 (10 minutes)

This piece argues that in competitive fields, formal applications are only part of the story: small, often unpaid actions like volunteering, sharing useful ideas, and showing up in the right communities can build the visibility and trust that lead to opportunities. It introduces the idea of “surface area for serendipity” as a way of thinking more strategically about relationship-building and career momentum.

My impact-focused career: you can create your own roles | 2025 (5 minutes)

In this reflection on his career path, Jamie Harris argues that impactful roles are not always advertised and sometimes can be shaped or created through unofficial work, conversations, and identifying unmet needs. It encourages readers to see career-building not just as applying to openings, but also as proactively making themselves useful and spotting the plethora of opportunities those merely applying to public openings often miss.

Two readings:

Cheap tests and expensive signals to develop professionally | 2024 (5 mins)

This reading offers a simple heuristic for professional development: look for cheap tests that help you learn whether you actually enjoy a skill or type of work, and expensive signals that convincingly show others you can do it.

Two cheap ways to test your fit for policy work | 2024 (5 mins)

This short piece suggests two low-cost ways to test your fit for policy: reading policy texts and writing up your views, and following a committee hearing to see whether you enjoy tracking arguments and forming your own. It's a practical reminder that you do not necessarily need a fellowship or internship to accept you first; you can start sampling the substance of policy work right away.

Professional development for policy careers

This reading explains professional development in policy as building four main assets over time: skills, knowledge, networks, and credentials. It helps readers think more strategically about internships, fellowships, jobs, education, and self-study as ways of developing long-term career capital rather than just chasing the next immediate opportunity.

Policy Entrepreneurship — Renaissance Philanthropy – A brighter future for all through science, technology, and innovation

This playbook introduces policy entrepreneurship: identifying policy windows, choosing the right policy lever, preparing the documents needed to move an idea forward, building coalitions, and using key moments in the policy calendar to create traction. It is particularly valuable for those who want to understand not just how policy careers work, but how ambitious actors can actually get policy change done.