This tool helps you compare the career options open to you according to the criteria you care about, weighted by how important each criterion is. It also asks how confident you are in each rating, so that a well-researched judgment counts for more than a guess.
Work through the steps in order using the options you've generated up to this point. Set aside an hour to do this thoroughly, or fifteen minutes for a first pass that you can come back to later.
About the confidence ratings. In most scoring models, a guess and a well researched judgment carry the same weight. Here, the less confident you are in a rating, the further it is pulled toward the middle of the scale, and each option ends up with a range rather than a single number. Where two ranges overlap, your current information doesn't separate those options. The results page lists the ratings that would be most worth firming up.
Here's an illustrative model using rough ratings. It is not intended to represent an actual evaluation of these options.
Write down which option you think will come out on top, before you do any of the ratings. When you reach the results, check whether your prediction agrees with the scores. If it doesn't, the discrepancy is worth getting curious about.
List the options you would seriously consider over the next few years, up to ten. You can think of these as narrowly or as broadly as you like. Include staying where you are, and include the ones you feel unsure about naming — an option you leave out won't be compared.
Choose four to six criteria and define each one in a sentence. There are no right or wrong answers here; what matters is that the criteria reflect the factors you want to take into consideration. The more precisely they're defined, the easier they will be to evaluate.
Try not to count the same thing twice. If you have both “career capital” and “long-term impact”, the skills you would build sit in both columns and get double the weight you meant to give them. Merge the two, or narrow one of them.
Click one to add it alongside your own criteria.
A weight says how much a criterion affects the final score. If you weight impact at 8 and income at 1, an option that does well on impact gains eight times as much from that as an option that does equally well on income. Weighting prevents a long list of minor criteria from outvoting the one or two things you actually care about.
Only the ratios matter, not the numbers themselves, so 2 and 1 say exactly what 20 and 10 would. You are not judging any of your options yet. You are saying how you want the decision made, before you know which option it favors.
We recommend weights that double: 1, 2, 4 and 8. The criteria that matter most to people usually matter a great deal more than the rest, not slightly more, and doubling steps capture that better than 1, 2, 3, 4 would. You can click the buttons to set those recommended weights, or enter any number from 0 to 100 in the box beside them if you want something else.
Every criterion is weighted 0, so they are all counting equally. Give at least one a weight above 0 to change that.
Check the percentage split in the rightmost column. This is how your decision is divided between your criteria. Double check whether it seems right, and adjust the weights above if it doesn't. If the widest band isn't the thing you would defend out loud to someone who knows you well, the weights need changing.
For each pairing, rate how well the option does on that criterion from 1 to 5, where 5 is best and 1 is worst, then say how confident you are in the rating. Fill in the initial ratings as quickly as you can, then go back column by column and compare them against each other.
Scroll the table sideways for the rest of your criteria →
If you are finding the ratings hard. Go down a column and ask two questions. Do the ratings make sense relative to each other? And is the range of ratings wide enough — do some options score noticeably higher than others? If every option lands on a 3 or a 4, the criterion is too broad to tell your options apart, so make it more specific or replace it.
On the confidence ratings. If you are only as certain as someone who is completely guessing, rate your confidence as very low. The model is built to handle that, and it will show you where firming up a rating would change the picture.
Scores run from 0 to 100, where 100 means every criterion rated 5 with full confidence. Look at what the ranking implies for your next steps, and at anything here that surprises you.
Note down anything you want to follow up on: your key uncertainties, hypotheses you would like to test, contradictions between your intuitive ranking and the scores, or anything else that would help you make a decision that is good by your own values.
Your work is saved in this browser as you go. The link below contains the whole model, so you can move it to another device, keep a copy, or send it to someone whose disagreement would be useful.
Each criterion's weight is normalized so that the weights sum to 1. Your confidence rating becomes a multiplier c: very low 0, low 0.25, medium 0.5, high 0.75, very high 1.
A rating you are less confident in is pulled toward the middle of the scale, in proportion to how uncertain you are:
The range around each option is the same sum computed with the best and worst cases: what the option would score if the things you are unsure about turned out well, and if they turned out badly. A rating you are very confident in adds nothing to the range; a rating you are guessing at adds its full weight.
The unadjusted score is the plain weighted average, ignoring confidence — the figure a conventional weighted factor model would give you. The difference between the two shows how much your uncertainty is affecting the result.
Unrated cells are treated as 3 with very low confidence, which is why an incomplete model shows very wide ranges.
Adapted from the Weighted Factor Model 2.0 by High-Impact Medicine and the Career Planning Workbook by High Impact Professionals.
This tool runs in your browser. What you enter is saved on your device and never sent anywhere else. Built by the Jewish Social Impact Network, adapted from the Weighted Factor Model 2.0 by High-Impact Medicine and the Career Planning Workbook by High Impact Professionals.
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