The Hard Truth About Impact Careers: Take A Pay Cut
You’re two, three, five or 10 years into your career and you have skills — you’ve worked in the private sector for example, doing finance, marketing, HR, etc but you’re frustrated and now you want to move to the social impact sector and use your skills for good.
Great, the world needs you!
First things first though. Stop looking at the policy job listings, and stay close to your job family.
I tell people you can’t change specialty, country, sector, and level of responsibility all at once; if you’re lucky you can change two but aiming for one is realistic. You have to accept this as one move among others. You’ll be able to change the other dimensions at another point — once you’re in an organization, or even in the sector, lateral moves and promotions are much easier.
When I moved from management consultancy to my first job in the non-profit sector at Save the Children, I stayed in London and I was still working as an internal consultant doing post-merger integration. I wanted to travel and do more content, but that was not where my skills and usefulness lay. After 18 months, I changed role within my organization and was traveling most of the time to Asia, the Middle East and Haiti, but still the content was lacking. When I changed jobs from London to New York to work at the Clinton Global Initiative, I was able to take a content-focused role, but my level of responsibility and management initially went down.
And of course from the private sector and even sometimes between NGOs, you have to be ready for a large pay cut.
I took a 40% pay cut from the private sector to Save the Children, got promoted twice there, and then took again a 40% pay cut to work at the Clinton Foundation in New York, a city where a shoebox studio’s rent was more than my 2-bedroom apartment in London. Luckily, after some time, I got promoted with some decent salary rises and the increased level of responsibility kept me interested and afloat!
You have to avoid pricing yourself out of the market.
I have post MBA friends who say they really want to work in social impact but can’t possibly afford to earn less than $100,000 or even $150,000 because of business school debt, etc. Then, once you get a mortgage, have kids, and you want to put them in a vaguely decent school, I gather $200k or even $250k is not enough at all.
That’s fine, but if you set that bar from the beginning you may never make the move until 30 years from now, when you have the mortgage paid for and the kids’ college funds settled. That’s an absolutely fine approach; if you look at the chairmen, CEOs or presidents of large foundations or NGOs, you indeed find a good number who spent 20 or 30 years doing very well in business and then moving much later into the social impact world.
I don’t recommend this however – for me, the journey is as important as the destination, and we need everyone to do good in the world, so don’t put off doing good chasing money and comfort.
You will have to make hard choices about your lifestyle — whether it’s going to live in Sudan for two years, or deep in Brooklyn while your friends earn double what you do but life should not be about keeping up with the Jones.
