You have 80,000 hours in your career.
This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.
If you’re fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren’t sure how, our career guide can help you:
- Get new ideas for fulfilling careers that do good
- Compare your options
- Make a plan you feel confident in
It’s based on 10 years of research alongside academics at Oxford. We’re a nonprofit, and everything we provide is free.
Career guide
Our career guide covers everything you need to know about how to find a fulfilling career that does good, from why you shouldn’t “follow your passion,” to why medicine and charity work aren’t always the best ways to help others.
It’s full of practical tips and exercises, and at the end, you’ll have a draft of your new career plan.
Or read the two-minute summary or get the guide as an audiobook.
Research
The issue you work on is probably the most important factor determining your impact. It’s important to focus on issues that are not only big, but also neglected and tractable. We think some such issues even threaten the long-run future of humanity – making them especially high priority.
The one-line summary of our career advice is: to have a fulfilling career, build useful skills and use them to tackle pressing global problems. We can help you figure out which skills to focus on and how to get started building them.
The highest impact career paths are those that put you in the best positions to tackle the most pressing problems. To help you get ideas for ways to contribute, we review some common options and list some unusual but especially high-impact paths.
The series covers our most important and novel research findings about how to increase the impact of your career, including: what “doing good” even means, why reducing existential risk might be humanity’s biggest and most neglected priority, and how to avoid accidentally making things worse.
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Podcast
In-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them.
Subscribe here, or anywhere you get podcasts:
Job board
Our job board provides a curated list of publicly advertised vacancies that we think are particularly promising. We post roles that we believe are opportunities to either (and often both):
- Contribute to solving key global problems.
- Develop the career capital — skills, experience, knowledge, connections and credentials — to solve these problems in the future.
Get 1-1 advice
If you’re interested in working on one of the global problems we highlight, apply to speak with our team one-on-one for free. We can discuss which problem to focus on, look over your plan, introduce you to mentors, and suggest roles that suit your skills.
Who are we?
We started 80,000 Hours when we were about to graduate from Oxford in 2011. Our aim was to provide the advice we wish we’d had back then: transparently explained, based on the best research available, and willing to ask the big questions. By doing this, we hope to get the next generation of leaders tackling the world’s most pressing problems.
How come this is all free?
We’re an independent nonprofit funded by individual donors and philanthropic foundations. They donate to us so that we can help people have a greater positive impact on the world. We don’t accept any corporate sponsorship or advertising fees.
Who is this for?
Our aim is to help people tackle the world’s biggest and most neglected problems, and our advice is aimed at people who have the good fortune to be able to make that their focus, as well as the security to change paths. Due to our limited capacity, some of our advice focuses on a narrow range of paths, and is especially aimed at talented college students and graduates aged 18–30, though many of the ideas we cover are relevant to everyone.
What research is your advice based on?
Our advice is based on hundreds of expert interviews; what we’ve learned advising 5,000+ people one-on-one over 10 years; and where possible, the academic literature on global problems and career success.
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