The highest-impact career for you is the one that allows you to make the biggest contribution to solving one of the world’s most pressing problems.
Early on, we recommend you focus on building useful skills – in a separate article you can see our list.
After that, you have to apply them. On this page, we provide reviews of over 20 specific career paths that put these skills to use tackling the world’s most pressing problems.
The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far
Most of these paths are difficult to enter, and it’s common to start by investing years in building useful skills before pursuing them. But if any might be a good fit for you, we encourage you to seriously consider it.
We’ve ranked these paths roughly in terms of our take on their expected impact, holding personal fit for each fixed and given our view of the world’s most pressing problems. But your personal fit matters a lot for your impact, and there is a lot of variation within each path too — so the best opportunities in one lower on the list will often be better than most of the opportunities in a higher-ranked one.
Improve organisational, political, and societal decision-making about AI to reduce catastrophic risks.
The development of AI could transform society. Help increase the chance it’s positive by doing technical research to find ways to prevent AI systems from carrying out dangerous behaviour.
Help reduce the risk of a global biological catastrophe, like an engineered pandemic much worse than COVID-19.
Help secure important organisations from attacks and prevent emerging technologies like AI and biotech from being misused, stolen, or tampered with.
Use knowledge of a key input into advanced AI systems to reduce risks and improve governance decisions.
Help Chinese companies and stakeholders involved in building AI make the technology safe and good for society.
Allocate philanthropic funding as effectively as possible by identifying and vetting new organisations and projects.
If you could cause two other equally talented people to use their skills to tackle the world’s most pressing problems, that’d be double the impact you’d have if you did it yourself.
Help reduce the dangers posed by nuclear weapons by working in policy, communications, or research.
One of the biggest bottlenecks for organisations working on pressing global problems is excellent operations staff to design, scale, and implement great systems.
Help identify the most pressing global problems and the most effective ways to solve them to enable others to have a greater impact.
Other high-impact career paths
Our top-ranked paths won’t be right for everybody, and there are lots of ways to have an impactful career. Here we list some additional paths we think can be high impact for the right person. These aren’t ranked in terms of impact, and there are surely many promising paths we haven’t written about at all.
Take a job that lets you contribute financially to funding-constrained, highly effective organisations. Two particularly strong options for this strategy are quantitative trading and founding a tech startup.
Most people can only do great work within a great organisation. Make it possible to deploy more talent and resources towards progress on pressing global problems.
Learn about policy making and government while having a direct social impact by helping improve government policies.
Build a platform and spread important ideas about pressing global problems and how we can best solve them.
Help powerful institutions make good predictions and decisions, particularly around catastrophic risks.
Use coding skills to help shape the development of AI, prevent pandemics, and support the most impactful nonprofits.
Roles in AI companies come with great potential for career growth in one of the world’s most sought-after fields — but there’s a substantial risk of doing harm.
Multiply the impact of research by guiding, coordinating, and promoting the best work.
Help philanthropists invest resources now in order to deploy the returns in the medium- to long-term future, or whenever the time is right.
Do research in academia, which is home to some of the most far-reaching and cutting-edge research we can do.
The broader version of our top-recommended path on shaping China’s involvement in AI: help coordinate China and the West on a variety of global issues.
Some ways to build career capital
Most high-impact career paths, like those above, require years building up skills and experience — what we call career capital. See general advice on career capital, or check out the guides below on some specific ideas. The list is far from comprehensive.
Learn about founding a startup while gaining connections and a broad skill set.
These degrees are highly valuable for those hoping to take on important roles in the US federal government.
Earn a valuable credential while developing your legal knowledge, analytical skills, and professional network.
Understand the cutting edge of machine learning in order to contribute to the safe deployment of AI.
Build widely applicable and transferable skills in a fast-moving environment.
More career reviews
Below are many other career reviews we have written so far, listed alphabetically. Some of this content is a little out of date, so take the advice with a pinch of salt.
- Actuarial science
- Allied health professional
- Biomedical research
- Computer science PhD
- Data collection for AI alignment
- Data science (for skill-building & earning to give)
- Economics PhD
- Executive search
- Founding effective nonprofits (international development)
- Front office finance (for skill-building & earning to give)
- Historian of large societal trends, inflection points, progress, or collapse
- Management consulting (for skill-building & earning to give)
- Marketing (for skill-building & earning to give)
- Medical careers
- Nursing
- Party politics in the UK
- Philosophy academia
- Programme manager in international organisations
- Pursuing fame in art and entertainment
- Research & advocacy promoting impactful climate solutions
- Teaching
- UK commercial law (for earning to give)
- Web designer
- Working at effective nonprofits (international development)
How to choose which career path you should pursue
The purpose of these lists is to give you more ideas about high-impact career paths. There are likely many other options worth considering for your personal list that we don’t cover.
As we cover in our career guide, the overall impact of your career depends on both:
- How impactful the path is in general
- Your degree of personal fit with it
Typically, once you have some good ideas for impact, we recommend narrowing down mainly based on fit — including whether the path is likely to be sustainable and personally satisfying.
Early on in your career, it might be more helpful to pick a broader skill set to learn instead of narrowing down to just one particular path.
If you want to do a more detailed comparison of a list of options, use our career decision process.
This is also just one step in making a full career plan – see the rest of our advice on career planning, including a career plan worksheet.
New to 80,000 Hours? Take a look at our career guide.
Our career guide is based on 10+ years of research alongside academics at Oxford. It aims to teach you how to find a fulfilling career that does good.
It’s full of practical tips and exercises. At the end, you’ll have a draft of your new career plan.
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