The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far
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. On this page, we describe skill sets to build early in your career that can help you make a bigger contribution. Plus, we have reviews of 30 or so more specific career paths we think are especially impactful given the problems we think are most pressing.
These recommendations are based on 10 years of research and experience advising people — use them to get ideas for next steps and new career paths you might have missed.
Table of Contents
- 1 Top skill sets for tackling global problems
- 2 The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far
- 3 Other high-impact career paths we’re excited about
- 4 Ways to build skills and other career capital that we’ve reviewed
- 5 Other career reviews
- 6 How to choose which career path you should pursue
Top skill sets for tackling global problems
Early career, we recommend you focus on building useful skills. So which skills are most useful for solving important global problems? Here’s our list.
We suggest you choose between these primarily based on personal fit. Click through to the profiles to see why we recommend them, concrete advice for how to build each one, and how you can work out which is the best fit for you.
Learn to get things done in the world’s largest and most important institutions (in particular national governments), which often play a crucial role in tackling global problems.
Help build and boost great organisations doing important work through skills like management, operations, legal and financial oversight, entrepreneurship, and fundraising.
Convey important ideas and information in a compelling way in order to help others focus on the right things and work more effectively.
Learn programming and then apply your skills to build useful software or conduct analyses relevant to pressing problems.
Learn about China and use that experience to help improve global coordination in crucial areas.
Gain relevant — but sometimes niche — knowledge in important areas, like vaccinology, AI hardware or development economics.
Keep in mind that this list isn’t exhaustive. Plus, almost any skill set can be worth pursuing if you’re sufficiently good at it. You should look for the skills that have the best balance of being useful and being something you could get great at.
The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far
These are guides to some more specific career paths that seem especially high impact. Most of these are difficult to enter, and it’s common to start by investing years in building the skills above 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.
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.
State regulation and industry governance may determine whether the deployment of AI goes well or badly. This path is currently underdeveloped, but building policy experience and expertise now may allow you to have an exceptionally high impact in the future.
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.
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 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.
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.
Help powerful institutions make good predictions and decisions, particularly around catastrophic risks.
Other high-impact career paths we’re excited about
Below we list some other career paths that we don’t recommend as often or as highly as those above, but which can still often be top options for people we advise. Take a look and consider any that might be a good fit for you. These aren’t ranked in terms of impact.
High-impact but especially competitive
Most people can only do great work within a great organisation. Make it possible to deploy more talent and resources toward progress on pressing global problems.
Help anticipate future changes to society and technology by examining the past.
Build a platform and spread important ideas about pressing global problems and how we can best solve them.
Potentially high-impact but still under-researched
Research, promote, or implement policies that address global issues beyond biosecurity and AI safety.
Help emerging global powers coordinate with the rest of the world in addressing pressing global problems.
Help philanthropists invest resources now in order to deploy the returns in the medium- to long-term future, or whenever the time is right.
See if we can make progress on an under-researched problem that could be even more pressing than those we currently prioritise.
Act like a social scientist to design and build pipelines that collect data from humans which could be useful for AI alignment.
Other impactful options if you’re an especially good fit
You don’t have to be a technical or policy researcher to help AI labs work toward greater safety.
Use coding skills to help shape the development of AI, prevent pandemics, and support the most impactful nonprofits.
Multiply the impact of research by guiding, coordinating, and promoting the best work.
Grow the effective altruism community by running events, mentoring, and connecting people to one another.
Get great career capital by working at a tech startup — and if it works out, have a positive impact by donating part of your earnings.
Do research in academia, which is home to some of the most far-reaching and cutting-edge research we can do.
Identify and implement the most effective solutions to climate change by focusing on the most extreme risks and neglected technologies.
Get an extremely high-paying job, then donate some of your salary to the most effective charities you can find.
Know of someone doing very valuable work? Multiply their impact by taking time-consuming tasks off their plate.
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.
Ways to build skills and other career capital that we’ve reviewed
Learn about policy making and government while having a direct social impact by helping improve government policies.
Get a valuable credential in a field relevant to most of our priority paths (especially global priorities research), plus set yourself up for good earning-to-give options.
Understand the cutting edge of machine learning in order to contribute to the safe deployment of AI.
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.
Roles in AI labs come with great potential for career growth in one of the world’s most sought-after fields — but in some cases there’s a risk of doing harm.
Other career reviews
Below are all the 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 science (for skill-building & earning to give)
- Executive search
- Founding effective nonprofits (international development)
- Front office finance (for skill-building & earning to give)
- 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
- Product manager in tech
- Programme manager in international organisations
- Pursuing fame in art and entertainment
- 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 down based on fit — including whether the path is likely to be sustainable and personally satisfying.
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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