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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: Writing about my job: Operations Manager, published by Joy Bittner on January 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I’m fairly new to EA, and this is my first contribution to the forum, mostly because I didn’t feel particularly expert enough on any EA topic to weigh in. However, I’m not new to the world of ‘operations’ and have found that I’ve been approached by a variety of people who want a better understanding of what is meant by operations and help deciding if it would be a good career choice for them. There has already been a bit of past discussion of ops on the forum; EA Norway’s posts do a great job of breaking down the skills needed, Eli_Nathan’s post shares some thoughts on alignment and personal fit and finally, this AMA post gets a bit more into the weeds for those who are more interested in some of the specifics. Also, this 80,000 Hours podcast is quite inspiring. This post is intended to be a summary of the broad advice and suggestions I would say to someone considering operations. Why I am qualified to write this article I definitely don’t claim to be an operations ‘expert;’ these are more just the thoughts of someone who’s been doing this for a while, in my case, going on about 14 years, specifically working in younger, small-sized orgs. I’m currently the Operations Manager for the Happier Lives Institute and also working on launching a separate mental health project (teaser- watch for a future post). How I got here I started out by going the formal studies route: first through a master’s in social work with a concentration in social service administration (basically how to manage a nonprofit) where I took classes on topics such as grant-writing and HR. Then, I did a second masters/postgraduate degree in Nonprofit Management (Administración de las organizaciones sin fines de lucro, for my beloved Spanish speakers) from the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires (should anyone be interested) where we went even more in depth on topics like org charts (lots of Drucker), finances for NGOs, and marketing etc. Unless you want to specialize in a particular one area, you don’t have to study formally for these sorts of roles, but like anything, it helps. What do operations people do? If you google ‘what does an operations manager do?’ (which I just did) you’ll find the descriptions extremely vague and will include terms like ‘design, maintain, and improve organization operations.’ The reason for this is that operations will vary tremendously across industries and the size of the industry. When I worked for a handmade fair trade jewelry company, I thought a lot about details like “does this barcode sticker have the right size font to meet the corporate warehouse requirements?” “How can I create a color chart to ensure that every time a customer buys earrings in ruby red, they get ruby red and not crimson red?’ Whereas, when I worked for a human rights org doing work in the Amazon, I would research what type of anti-venom the team should have in the first aid kit they took into the field. Working now with HLI, some of the most fun moments to date have been organizing and running our team retreat. We spent time hanging out and cooking together in a quirky condo while collaboratively defining the organization’s big picture ‘moonshot’ goals..and I also forced everyone to take a ‘team-building’ hike off my personal bucket list (the sneaking secret advantage of being the one to set the agenda). In summary, my definition of operations is: keep the internal bits of the organization functioning smoothly. I’ve noticed in EA, as they tend to be fairly small / young ogs, the term operations manager is used to encompass all the random backend administration tasks that an org needs to do to keep operating. This will likely include some variety of: Human resources (HR):...