How to be successful

How to advance in your career

You’ve already chosen a career. Now, how do you succeed within it?

See our career profiles to see if we have any information about your career of interest.

When it comes to advice on how to get jobs, we tend to defer to the huge amount of information already out there.

We’ve found that vault and wet feet are high quality sources of advice. Conventional careers advisers, especially those specialising in an area, may also be useful. And there are lots of books about specific options.

Let us know if you find anything particularly useful, at careers@80000hours.org.

Often the most useful thing we can do for you is to introduce you to someone else a little bit ahead in your chosen path. Join and introduce yourself to on our members forum. Speak to our careers team.

How to achieve more

Spending time becoming more productive is often worth it, and can let you have much more impact.

Imagine you’re at college. At the beginning of the year, you go through each of your courses. By looking at old exams and talking to your professor, you work out exactly which classes you need to learn in order to make your grades. Anything else which isn’t useful in itself, you drop. By doing this, suppose you can skip one class in ten. By doing this, you save four hours per week. Well, that would add up to over one hundred hours over the year. So that means it would be worth spending two and a half weeks of full time work figuring out how to do this. In fact, it will probably take much less time. And that means more time for high impact volunteering!

Thinking about your whole career, if you can learn a productivity technique that let’s you do 1% more, then it would be worth spending 800 hours learning how to do it. That’s 20 weeks of full time work!

We’re currently gathering the best, evidence-based resources on productivity.

Please contact us if you know one: careers@80000hours.org