Why 80,000 Hours?

You have about 80,000 working hours in your career: 40 years x 50 weeks x 40 hours.

If you want to have a positive impact with your life, your choice of career is probably your best opportunity to do that.

That means it’s worth thinking hard about how to use this time most effectively. If you can make your career 1% higher impact (whatever that means to you), it would in theory be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how.

We aim to help you work out how you can best use your 80,000 hours to help others, and to take action on that basis.

We believe you can increase your impact by much more than 1%, and it’ll take a lot less than 800 hours.

Learn more about why we think your choice of career is the biggest ethical decision you’ll ever make.

What do we do?

80,000 Hours provides research and support to help talented people move into careers that tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

After more than 10 years of research into dozens of problem areas, we’re putting most of our focus on helping people work on positively shaping the trajectory of AI, because we think it presents the most serious and urgent challenges that the world is facing right now.

We also think making AGI go well will require addressing a variety of issues and take contributions from a huge number of people with different skills (technical and non-technical). So we think that many people in our audience will be able to help.

What we offer:

1. Our online guides — especially our career guide, which covers core advice on how to have an impactful career, our problem profiles series, explaining which global problems are most pressing, our hub for using your career to help make AGI go well, and our career reviews, which highlight especially high-impact career paths and how to enter them.

2. Our podcast — in-depth interviews about the world’s most pressing problems, and how you can help solve them

3. Our job board — with current opportunities to build skills and work on big and neglected problems

4. Our one-on-one service — providing individualised career advice for our more engaged readers, helping them make individual plans and important career connections, and matching some users to key high-impact roles

We’re a nonprofit funded by philanthropic donations, and everything we provide is free.

How did we get started?

80,000 Hours started in 2011 when our founders, Ben and Will, were about to graduate from Oxford, and were wondering what to do with their own careers.

Like many, they wanted careers that were satisfying, paid the bills, and made a worthwhile contribution to society — but they were really unsure which paths would be best.

The standard advice seemed like it was to become a teacher, doctor, or charity worker, but these didn’t seem like a great fit for them. Should they instead go into research? Join a political campaign? Or something else?

It didn’t seem like existing career advice even tried to answer this question, so Ben and Will started doing their own research.

They presented their early ideas in a lecture in February 2011, and to their surprise, several people in the audience decided to totally change their career plans. And several asked them to start an organisation.

Inspired by this feedback, a team was formed and 80,000 Hours was started as a part-time project in 2011.

Our aim from the start has been to provide the advice we wish we’d had: in-depth, based on the best research available, and taking seriously the question of how to do the most good.

Our thinking was that if we could enable just a couple of people to find high-impact careers, that would be like a multiplier on what we could achieve ourselves.

We hired a full-time team in 2012, and since then, we’ve spoken to hundreds of experts, read what relevant literature we could find, and conducted our own analyses of many career paths. Over 3,000 people have told us they’ve changed to higher-impact paths due to our advice.

Most recently, in early 2025, we shifted our strategic approach to focus more on helping people work on navigating the transition to a world with powerful AGI, which has been our top-ranked problem since 2016.

We still have a lot to learn, and we’ve made some mistakes, but we hope that by sharing what we’ve learned, we can help speed up our readers’ journeys toward high-impact careers, and by doing that, help tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

Read more about our progress each year in our annual reviews. You can also hear Ben tell our founding story in this podcast.

What impact has 80,000 Hours had so far?

As of 2024, we’ve had over 10 million readers on our website, have 400,000 subscribers to our newsletter, and have given one-on-one advice to over 5,000 people.

Over 3,000 people have told us that, due to engaging with us, they have significantly changed their career plans and expect to have a larger social impact as a result.

We’ve also been one of the largest drivers of growth in the effective altruism community.

Some of our readers whose stories we’re especially proud of include:

People we’ve worked with have helped to:

• Develop the fields of research around AI alignment, catastrophic pandemics, and global priorities
• Build the effective altruism movement
• Pledge tens of millions of dollars to life-saving interventions in the developing world

They include people working in top AI security organisations and the White House, up-and-coming academics, founders of new nonprofits, and philanthropists.

Hundreds of our readers have also pledged 10% of their income to charity through our sister organisation, Giving What We Can.

More formally, we evaluate our impact by tracking the number of significant career plan changes we cause. You can read much more about how we evaluate our impact in our annual reviews.

What’s our vision and plan for growth?

So many people want to make a difference,¹ but most career advice doesn’t even discuss the question of which career paths are highest impact, so they fail to have as much impact as they could.

Our aim is to become the best source of advice and support for students and recent graduates who prioritise impact, helping them find satisfying careers that fulfil their potential to contribute to the world.

By doing this, our aim is to get the next generation of leaders tackling the world’s biggest and most neglected problems.

Right now, we’re especially focused on helping people work on making AGI go well, because we think this is probably the best way to achieve our high-level, cause-impartial goal of helping people have high-impact careers.

We’d also love to spark a global conversation about how people can best use their careers to help the world, and to inspire more people to take a high-impact path. We want the new default to be that everyone with the privilege to have options in their career asks themselves: “Which global problems are most pressing? And how can I best use my career to tackle them?”

You can see much more detail about our progress and our plans for the coming years in our annual reviews.

How are we funded?

We’re a nonprofit funded by individual donors and philanthropic foundations, primarily those involved in the effective altruism community.² Our largest funder is Open Philanthropy. You can donate to us here.

We don’t accept advertising or corporate sponsorship, so we can focus on helping our readers have a greater positive impact.

Who is our advice aimed at?

Our aim is to do the most we can to help solve big neglected problems. Given our limited capacity, we need to prioritise which audiences we work with, as well as which career paths and issues we cover, in order to make the biggest positive difference we can.

Our advice is focused on people with the privilege to have options for how to spend their careers, and the security and ability to make helping the world one of their main goals.

We especially focus on people 18–45 living in English-speaking countries, especially the US or UK, who want to take an analytical approach to doing good, in part because this is the career landscape we know best.

Some of our resources, such as our list of high-impact career paths and one-on-one advice — where we have especially limited capacity — are aimed at people who are unusually ambitious and high-performing, because this allows us to achieve a lot even if we only work with a small number of people.

However, the core principles we cover, such as the advice in our career guide, our list of top skills to build, and our advice on career planning, apply to anyone who wants to make impact a priority.

If you’re not able to change your career right now, see our advice on how to have a big impact without changing your job, through advocacy, political engagement, and donations.

Many people are not in a position to spend time on social impact, let alone make it a large focus, and that’s fine — we also have many priorities in life besides impact. But if you are in such a position, we hope we can help.

Learn more in advice on how to read our advice.

Who is on the team?

We have a full-time team of more than 30 people. You can read about them and some of our research advisors on our team page.

Which partners do we work with?

• We consider ourselves a part of the effective altruism community and often draw on the work of others committed to using evidence and reason to find the best ways to help others. For instance, we draw on the work of Open Philanthropy, a philanthropic and research foundation that is 80,000 Hours’ biggest funder.
• We often work with researchers at the University of Oxford, including several of our past board members.
• We also consider ourselves part of the AI safety community, and often seek input from leading groups in the area, such as Forethought.
• Until April 1, 2025, 80,000 Hours was a project of the Effective Ventures group — the umbrella term for Effective Ventures Foundation and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc., which are two separate legal entities that work together. Other projects under this umbrella include Giving What We Can and the Centre for Effective Altruism.
• In 2015, we attended Y Combinator, one of the world’s top startup accelerators.
• See a list of some of our external advisors and board members.

Our cultural values

We aim to uphold the following values in carrying out our work:

1. Ambitious long-term impact — will a given action or approach make us into the world’s best source of career advice for people who want to maximise their positive impact?
2. A modest, scientific mindset — why might our views be wrong?
3. Openness and honesty — default to transparency and take the ‘red face test.’
4. Focus — say no to everything that’s not the top priority, then obsess.
5. Fun and friendliness — say what’s true, kind, and necessary (and funny).
6. Self-care and personal growth — don’t forget about the long term.
7. Exceptionally well-researched advice — go one step too far.

Read more

Diversity and inclusion

We strive to be a workplace where people from different backgrounds thrive. This includes people from different races, gender identities, sexual orientations, nationalities, and beyond.

We recognise that because of historical and continuing oppression and inequality, this requires sustained effort. We’re often uncertain about how to make our systems, content, and policies more equitable and inclusive, so we regularly solicit input from not just members of our current team but also the Effective Ventures Foundation (our former parent organisation), the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), and external advisors with relevant expertise.

We also endorse CEA’s stance on diversity and inclusion in the effective altruism community and within organisations.