Announcing the new 80,000 Hours career guide

By · Published September 4th, 2023 ·

From 2016 to 2019, 80,000 Hours’ core content was contained in our persistently popular career guide. (You may also remember it as the 80,000 Hours book: 80,000 Hours — Find a fulfilling career that does good).

Today, we’re re-launching that guide. Among many other changes, in the new version:

You can read the guide here or start with a 2-minute summary.

It’s also available as a printed book (you can get a free copy by signing up for our newsletter or buy it on Amazon), audiobook, podcast series or ebook (available as a .pdf or .epub).

We’d appreciate you sharing the new guide with a friend! You can send them a free copy using this link. Many of the people who’ve found our advice most useful in the past have found us via a friend, so we think the time you take to share it could be really worthwhile.

What’s in the guide?

The career guide aims to cover the most important basic concepts in career planning. (If instead you’d like to see something more in-depth, see our advanced series and podcast.)

The first article is about what to look for in a fulfilling job:

The next five are about which options are most impactful for the world:

The next four cover how to find the best option for you and invest in your skills:

The last two cover how to take action and launch your dream career:

Why did we make this change?

In 2019, we deprioritised 80,000 Hours’ career guide in favour of our key ideas series.

Our key ideas series had a more serious tone and was more focused on impact. It represented our best and most up-to-date advice. We expected that this switch would reduce engagement time on our site, but that the key ideas series would better appeal to people more likely to change their careers to do good.

However, the drop in engagement time which we could attribute to this change was larger than we’d expected. In addition, data from our user survey suggested that people who changed their careers were more, not less, likely to have found and used the older, more informal career guide (which we kept up on our site).

As a result, we decided to bring the advice in our career guide in line with our latest views, while attempting to retain its structure, tone, and engagingness.

We’re retaining the content in our key ideas series: it’s been re-released as our advanced series.

Has it been successful so far?

Yes!

We’ve had positive feedback on the quality of the content in the guide, and we’ve also seen many more people reading this guide than our key ideas series. Since soft launching the guide in May, we’ve seen about a 30% increase in total weekly engagement time on our site.

How can you help?

Please take a look at the guide and, if possible, share it with a friend! You can send them a free copy using this link.

You can also give us some feedback on the guide using this form.

Here are the links to the guide again:

Thank you so much!

    Notes and references

    1. We no longer say it’s a mistake not to get transferable career capital. Instead, we focus on “getting good at something that’s useful.” We also updated the concrete options to be in line with our current views, and added “character” to the components of career capital. Finally, we added a section on which skills are likely to be automated.↩

    2. The main reason we focus on existential risk is that our best guess is that working on existential risk has a higher impact on the margin than working on other areas as a result of the impact of existential risk on future generations. We try to explain why this is our best guess in the career guide, as well as our longer articles on our definition of social impact, longtermism, and existential risks.↩