New releases

Our trustees and advisory board have reviewed our six month evaluation. This report presents a summary report from each group, outlining their main concerns with and comments on the overall progress of the organisation.

Our trustees are Toby Ord, Nick Beckstead and William MacAskill (who is also our President).

Will issued the following statement:

This is the fifth post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation

This report outlines our key priorities for the next six months.

Summary and Discussion

• We continue to see the top priority as further investment i.e. developing our business model, content and the organisation’s robustness.

• The flagship goal in this area is carrying out 30 case studies, which will form the centre of our content and evaluation efforts.

• Also important is: (i) more impact evaluation in general (ii) fundraising enough to keep up with our expanding budget (iii) increasing our talent pool through training and outreach (iv) increase the appeal of our content to successful young professionals through rebranding (v) having high quality research on our key ideas to support the case studies on our blog.

• Outreach is less high priority, except insofar as we do enough to ensure a strong stream of candidates for case studies and internships, and build up credibility (e.g. receiving press coverage and impressive affiliations).

• We’re also not yet focused on scaling up delivery, because we think it will be overall faster to spend more time developing our content at this stage.

Last month, 80,000 Hours ran its first ever career workshop! This post is a quick summary of the workshop: what we covered, what career changes it led to, and how it was received by our attendees.

Drawing on similarities between an individual planning their career and a startup business, we’ve realised the importance of learning and adapting to change early in your career. Rigid career plans don’t seem that useful, and could even be harmful – but you do still need some means of direction and motivation for the future.

One promising solution we’ve found is the idea of having a “career model”: identifying your aims and values, and making a best guess of how you might achieve them. What’s key is that this model is designed to be tested and adapted as you learn.

Hopefully you’ve seen by now that 80,000 Hours is hiring!

In addition to the positions advertised previously, we’re also looking for a Finance Manager and Director of Fundraising. Both would be full-time paid positions based in Oxford, and you’d be working across both 80,000 Hours and our sister organisation Giving What We Can.

The deadline for all positions is Friday 16th August at 5pm GMT.

How do you even begin going about trying to assess the impact of a career?

It might seem impossible. But if you don’t try to weigh up your options, you’ll end up doing far less for the world than you could otherwise.

It’s not an easy question, but it is a fascinating one that has a great deal of importance for the world. After talking one-on-one with around 100 people about their careers, asking people who have made a big impact, and thinking through what matters, we’ve developed an initial simple framework for assessing the value of different careers.

We want to change the world by revolutionising something incredibly important: the way people think about and spend their careers. Our mission is to help talented and dedicated people have the biggest possible positive impact with their careers. This is a big project, and we’re growing fast, so we’re looking for bright and ambitious people to join us. If this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, then apply to work for us!