Your comparative advantage refers to the extra advantage you have in a particular role in relation to the skills and strengths of others who could do the job. Playing to your comparative advantage can help you to maximize your counterfactual impact, even if (perhaps surprisingly) it isn’t the role you are best at or most qualified for.
You might assume the best career move is to focus on whatever you’re best at. But that’s not always true. If you want to have a positive impact, it’s more important to pursue your comparative advantage: the work that’s most valuable when taking into account what it enables others to do. Crucially, this isn’t always the same as the work that you’re best at.
This sounds a little unintuitive, but this happens because comparative advantage takes opportunity cost into account. In short, opportunity cost is what you give up by taking on one type of work instead of another. With opportunity cost in mind, the question becomes which tasks make the best use of your time compared to the alternatives, both for you and for others who could do those tasks instead. Sometimes that means doing work that others are technically better at, if it frees others up to do something where the skill gap matters more.
Comparative advantage in action
As an example, imagine two doctors working in a clinic in a resource-constrained region. Dr. Chen is excellent at both surgery and training local healthcare workers. Dr. Martinez is decent at both, but significantly less skilled than Dr. Chen at surgery. The obvious move seems like Dr. Chen should do surgery (where the skill gap is biggest) and Dr. Martinez should focus on training.
But look at the opportunity costs. When Dr. Chen spends a day training instead of operating, the organization loses several complex surgeries that only she can perform well. When Dr. Martinez trains instead of operating, they lose much less surgical capacity because he wasn’t doing as many difficult procedures anyway. So even though Dr. Chen is still the better trainer, Dr. Martinez has the comparative advantage in training because it costs the clinic less, in terms of opportunity cost, for him to do it.
Applying comparative advantage to career decisions
Thinking about comparative advantage can be a great way to increase the impact of your career–and can lead to considering options you might not have otherwise.
Suppose, for instance, that your organization is looking to promote a researcher into a management position. You’re currently a great researcher, and you would only be an average manager. However, your colleagues would all be awful managers. In this case, there’s a good chance your comparative advantage lies in management. Supposing your colleagues are all just as good at research as you, you’ll help your organization much more by applying for the managerial role, even though you’re not a great manager.
Of course, real-life scenarios tend to be much more complicated than these simple examples. It’s hard to know exactly how good you’d be in a certain career or role, and it’s even harder to know how good everyone else would be. There will almost always be more people applying for roles than the number of roles available, so things get complicated very quickly. However, there are still some rules of thumb you can use to gauge what your comparative advantage might be.
How do I know what my comparative advantage is?
For one, you might consider whether there are any talent bottlenecks in promising cause areas. If there’s a strong need for a particular profession, and you’re at least moderately competent at it, then there’s a good chance this could be your comparative advantage. Even if you’re better at other types of work, the fact that there is a shortage in this career path implies that even an average worker could have a large counterfactual impact.
But if you don’t have good information about what skills are in demand, then you could consider how rare your skills are in general.
If you’re good at something that not many others are, and which can be applied to tackling important problems, then you might have a comparative advantage in this skill. And if you have a particular set of skills that are rarely present together (for example, someone who is both technically gifted and a great people manager), then there’s an even greater chance that a career using all these skills will be your comparative advantage.
However, when you aren’t even able to know where different skills are needed most, it might not be helpful to think in terms of comparative advantage. Instead, see our career guide for an overview of the more general considerations you should consider when choosing an impactful career.
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