What’s this based on?

The primary author, Brenton Mayer, who works for 80,000 Hours, drew on his initial training in dentistry and previous experience working as a doctor. We spoke to three people working in these professions and ran a draft of this review past two additional people working in healthcare. We also read existing career profiles on ONET, Prospects and the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, as well as some relevant academic literature.

What is this career path?

Rather than being initially trained as generalists like nurses and doctors, allied health professionals are trained to look after a particular set of conditions, and do so mostly independently. For instance, physical therapists can diagnose and treat most causes of joint pain, but if your physical therapist thought your knee pain was caused by something that they couldn’t treat, they would send you to someone who could — perhaps a surgeon.¹

Below, you can see a list of the careers we researched. The boundary around “allied health” is vague. We didn’t include clinical psychologists, social workers or alternative health practitioners, even though they’re often included. We did include dentistry, even though it’s often excluded.² We have separate profiles on medicine and nursing.

Note that the requirements and income vary by country, so follow the links here to get figures for your location:

Why do this career?

The more highly paid professions are solid options for earning to give

The median US earnings for the highest-paid paths are $158,000 for dentists, $122,000 for pharmacists and $119,000 for podiatrists. The top 10% of dentists, podiatrists and optometrists all earn over $187,000 per year, and orthodontists (the specialised dentists who work with braces) earn a mean of $221,000. These are higher incomes than the median for actuaries ($97,000) and software developers ($101,000), and are even comparable to petroleum engineers ($130,000).³

Most of the jobs in the area earn over $70,000, which is still twice the median income,⁴ and earnings are generally higher than nursing at $67,000.

However, the incomes are still much lower than medicine, which earns a median of over $200,000, but is far more competitive.³

Health professions by median earnings in the USA. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)

The highest-earning paths are the most competitive and take the longest time to qualify for. For example, becoming a dentist in the US requires completing a bachelor’s degree with a GPA of around 3.5, and then a 4 year postgraduate degree.

For those interested in respiratory therapy, the minimum entry requirements are a GPA of 2.5 (or an SAT score in the top 50%), and you can graduate after 2 years.

In contrast, you can be admitted into a respiratory therapist course with a GPA of 2.5 or an SAT score in the top 50%, and graduate after two years.⁵

In the UK it’s more common for undergraduate degrees to lead directly to work, but earnings are markedly lower — British health professionals earn around half as much as their US colleagues.⁶ This is significantly lower than the difference in per capita income, which is only about 20%.⁷

Health is a growth area

Looking at the short term, most health professions are projected to grow 12-30% between 2014 and 2024, far more than the average of 7% for all jobs.

Health professions by projected growth.⁸ Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Turning to the long term, a study by academics at the University of Oxford suggests that jobs focused on delivering patient care are at low risk of automation in the next couple of decades (you can see the estimates for individual professions here)⁹. This is because it’s difficult to teach computers to correctly interpret and precisely interact with the changing physical space around them, and it’s even more difficult to program the social intelligence needed to look after patients.

At least two occupations are worth mentioning as possible exceptions to this generally rosy picture:

• Pharmacy jobs are projected to only grow by 3% during this decade, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting a reduction in the number of pharmacists in standard retail settings, as online and mail order pharmacies become more common.¹⁰ Speculating further ahead, technology could enable pharmacists to be more efficient, meaning fewer will be needed to look after a given population. More medical and prescription data will be electronically stored (allowing automatic checking for interactions between medications and conditions), and pill packaging and dispensing machines will likely become cheaper and more accurate.¹¹ If this occurs, the effects on employment will probably be felt by pharmacy aids and technicians first, whose jobs are amongst the most vulnerable to automation in healthcare.¹²
• Studying exercise physiology or sports science leads into a tough job market. Six months after graduating, only 60-70% of graduates are either employed or doing further study in the area.¹³ Salaries are also the lowest of the health professions we looked into, with many people working in gyms as personal trainers, a position which requires far less education. It’s an unfortunate illustration of some of the pitfalls of ‘following your passion’.

High job satisfaction

Surveys find that most health professions are in the top 25% of jobs in terms of job satisfaction. Physical therapy (a profession which treats a particularly high variety of conditions) fairs especially well, coming in as the second most satisfying job in one survey and the twelfth (out of 274) in another.¹⁴

This is what we’d expect since the work does well on all the ingredients of job satisfaction we’ve identified in our research. Allied health professionals directly help people in their work, which is satisfying. The work is also engaging: they have clear tasks with frequent feedback and significant responsibility for diagnosing and treating patients. They’ll work alongside other healthcare workers who they can discuss complex cases with, and they typically have less shift work than nurses and less demanding hours than doctors.

However, there are some negatives. One issue is that several professions, including optometrists and diagnostic radiographers, report a lot of repetition in their jobs, which decreases how engaging their work is.¹⁵ Another issue is that many allied health professionals become highly proficient early on and are able to practice unsupervised a year or so after graduating. Whilst mastering your field is good for job satisfaction, doing so right at the beginning and then rarely being exposed to work you find challenging probably decreases job satisfaction. This could be a problem for those professions that have relatively few options for career progression (such as dental hygiene).¹⁶

Reasons not to work in a health career

Some positive direct impact, but less than many people think

When working in health, it feels clear that you are helping your patients. Yet, as we explain in the article on medical careers, clinical practice in the developed world only has a modest impact. The key reason for this is that healthcare is already (relatively speaking) well funded in rich countries, so the easy opportunities to help people are already taken, which means additional people and money only have a small impact.

Our analysis was focused on doctors, but we think the impact of allied health professionals is unlikely to be significantly higher.

If you wanted to improve health, you could do more good by donating just a small percentage of your income to effective global health charities than by working directly within a rich country.¹⁷

If you wanted to maximise your direct impact as a health professional, what could you do?

• Move to the developing world, where healthcare needs are more acute. Our analysis suggests that you could have over 10 times more impact in a developing country because health spending is so much more neglected. Tara, a pharmacist and member of the 80,000 Hours community, saw lots of high impact opportunities to improve healthcare while she was working for the Red Cross. For example, she worked with locals in Bhutan to reduce the rate of drug errors. We would guess that moving to the developing world is most promising for optometrists, dentists and pharmacists. See further discussion in this footnote.¹⁸
• Improve the healthcare system. Perhaps you could serve on the board of your profession’s regulatory body, or work in hospital administration. These positions often seem neglected, and can potentially multiply your impact.
• Produce high impact research. With several of these options, you can start researching ways to improve your profession’s clinical practice while at university, and if you’re good at it you could make it a big part of your career. For instance, pharmacists sometimes work on developing new drugs.¹⁹ Otherwise, work to excel in your area and develop improved treatments and processes.

Whilst these are possible, note that only a small proportion of health professionals take these routes, and if you’re aiming to get into one of these areas there are likely better ways to get there. Degrees in medicine (for developing world work), health policy (for improving the healthcare system) and biomedical science/medicine (for high impact research) are all probably better options.

Overall, we think that the most promising way to have a big impact through the health careers we’ve reviewed is through earning to give, which is why this profile has been so focused on income and why we generally recommend people take the higher earning options.²⁰

Large upfront investment in training

In the UK, studying a health profession means making a call at a young age that you’ll remain interested in practicing your specialty for long enough to justify the 3-5 years you’ve spent training for it. In the US, you make this decision later in life because the degrees are often postgraduate, but it means a larger financial commitment and more total time at college (often 8 years in total for the most high-earning options).

Narrow career capital

What’s more, this training only prepares you for a narrow role. We normally recommend people build ‘flexible’ career capital early in their career, that is, skills, connections and credentials which will be useful in a wide range of jobs in the future. This is because it’s hard to predict how the job market will change and what you’ll be interested in in the future.

A degree in allied health, in contrast, mainly trains you for a single speciality which exists in a small set of work environments (clinics and hospitals in the developed world). So if you want to leave the career later, you won’t be in a much better position. This could easily happen if your preferences change, you find a better way to have an impact, or if the career does turn out to be vulnerable to automation.

Allied health even compares poorly to other vocational training, such as law, accounting or programming. If you qualify as a lawyer, there are many of types of legal work open to you, and legal knowledge is useful in most sectors of the economy, so even if you decide to leave law, you’ve gained something. Studying maths or economics would be even better again for flexibility.

What are the best options among the health careers we considered?

The following four stand out.

Who is most likely to succeed in these careers?

We think most of the social impact of working in these careers will come from earning to give, and once you’re in the job, the pay doesn’t vary that much (in contrast to something like sales, law or finance). So the key question is whether you can get into a university course, and whether you will enjoy the job enough to remain motivated.

The following factors seem to predict success in the health professions:

• High SAT and GPA (Grade Point Average) scores from a previous degree have been robustly shown to predict a higher GPA and completion rate of a health profession course.²⁷
• Several professions have standardised admission tests which are used by universities to decide which applicants they will admit. Some of these have been shown to predict good grades during the health course.²⁸
• Good interpersonal skills, along with an interest in working with and helping people is probably useful, given that you’ll be constantly interacting with the public.
• We’ve noted above that there are relatively few opportunities for career progression in some health careers, which suggests that people with a high need for growth will be less likely to find these options satisfying.

How does it compare to nearby alternatives?

Below we make some very rough comparisons between allied health and nearby options people often consider.

In all cases, the key consideration is your degree of personal fit. If you excel in an area, you’ll gain better career capital, be happier, earn more, have more direct impact, and have a bigger chance of making original contributions to the field. For instance, it’s probably better to be an outstanding nurse than a typical occupational therapist, even though occupational therapists earn more on average.

• If you’re deciding between nursing and these professions, from a social impact perspective, lean towards wherever you can earn the most and donating the extra.

• If you’re deciding between medicine and these professions, probably choose medicine. This is because medicine has higher pay and better exit options, plus better potential for doing advocacy, research and work in the developing world.

• Software engineering and data science have similar earnings, more flexible career capital and a much shorter training pathway than allied health. If you could enjoy working in one of those areas and be good at it, we’d recommend them over the allied health professions. There are steps to quickly test your potential in software engineering in the full profile.

• Sales & marketing/real estate have shorter training pathways and similar average earnings to these health careers. Whilst the highest paid people in these fields do better than the highest in allied health, the spread in earnings is larger, so there’s a chance of earning less. If you’re comfortable with this, have relatively good social skills, and are able to deal with the constant rejection associated with sales, these paths might be better.

• Corporate management usually involves more stress and longer hours than allied health. On the other hand the work is more varied, with greater opportunity for career advancement and more flexible career capital. Median salaries are comparable to the higher end of the allied health professions and if you do well it’s possible to earn much more.

• Most lawyers (as opposed to those from top firms as considered here) have a similar salary to the more highly paid allied health professions and law is also a good option for those who are strong on verbal skills. It gives you more flexible career capital and a chance to earn a lot more, but the hours are probably longer (particularly at the start of your career) and job satisfaction is lower. We’d recommend whichever you would enjoy and have the best personal fit for.

Again, in all cases, the general pros and cons need to be weighed against how much you’d enjoy the job and how good you’d be at it.

Should you become an allied health professional?

Here are some key questions to ask yourself.

• Could you find working as a health professional satisfying? Would you enjoy near constant social interaction and working with the general public? Does the health profession you’re considering work in a narrow field which you would find repetitive after a decade or more?

• Are you comfortable with the idea of earning to give being the main way that you have an impact with your career? Are you reasonably confident that you will follow through with donating a substantial proportion of your future earnings?

• Relative to your other options, is this a good option for earning to give? Could you get into one of the higher earning pathways, like podiatry, dentistry or optometry? Could you work in a country which pays health workers well, such as Australia or the US? How does it compare to other options you’d consider?

• Do you highly value having a stable job, which isn’t too demanding of your time, either for personal reasons, or so you can do high-impact volunteering? The allied health professions have standardised career paths, strong projected job growth, and usually 40 hour work weeks. If you value these more than the average person, this is a point in favour of allied health.

• Most importantly, have you explored other options, so that you’re 80%+ confident that this is the path for you? Becoming a health professional means making a large up-front investment in a career with narrowly applicable career capital and relatively few opportunities for advancement. This makes it really important to explore your other options before committing. Read about how to explore.

As always, if you couldn’t imagine yourself doing anything but working as an allied health professional, you should probably become one.

How to learn more and test out your potential

Before committing to a university course, you can test out your fit for a career in health by:

• Learning more about what the different options involve by reading the BLS and Prospects guides on the professions you’re interested in. You can also look at our wiki which will suggest some more resources.
• Finding out which professions you could get the grades required to enter, because some of the university courses are very competitive.
• Looking into what the professions are like day-to-day by speaking to friends of friends who work in the area.
• Organising to ‘shadow’ someone working in one of these professions for a few days. An ideal setting is a hospital so that you can see what other health care workers are doing and perhaps arrange to do the same with them if you’re interested in their work.

How to enter this path

• Prepare your university application. During your prior education you should be aiming to study all the necessary prerequisite subjects and achieving the required grades. You should demonstrate an interest in the subject through shadowing people or working in a related area.
• Find and follow some advice tailored to the specific course you’re applying for.
• Often you’ll need to take a specific admission test and it’s worthwhile studying specifically for that.
• Finally, apply to a university to train you in your chosen profession.