In the recent content release, we added a new top careers page.
It’s based on the popular blog post we released in February – “in which career can you make the most difference? – but with several changes…
Some have claimed “follow your passion” is the definitive career advice of our time.
The idea behind the slogan “follow your passion” is that the best way to choose a career is to:
The reason this advice works is because:
We mainly disagree with the first and last claims: matching your career with your passions is not a particularly good way to find satisfying work, and being good at what you do is only one factor that matters for having a social impact.
We want to be transparent about how we go about our research into career choice, so in the latest site update, we added a page listing the principles we use to guide our research. The full page is here. I’ve copied the text below.
What principles do you think we’ve missed? Which parts don’t you agree with?
One of our key new pages is ‘how to choose’ – a step-by-step process for making your next career decision. It explains how to tie all of our information together to make a rational next decision, and is based on the process we use in coaching and workshops.
In summary…
We’ve recently expanded our research page into a series of ten, supported by sixteen career profiles. In total, we’ve released around 30,000 words of new content.
We provide an overview of everything on the getting started page.
The three most important pages are:
Some other important pages include:
Many of our views on these topics have changed since we last wrote about them. I’ll be going through some of the changes on the blog over the next couple of weeks.
I recently conducted a ‘shallow investigation’ (see GiveWell) into cause prioritization, with the help of Nick Beckstead. It covers the importance of cause prioritization; who is doing it, funding it, or using it; and opportunities to contribute. We had conversations with eight relevant people. The full document is here and the collection of related interview notes and such is here. This blog post is a summary of my impressions, given the findings of the investigation.
Cause prioritization research seems likely enough to be high value to warrant further investigation. It appears that roughly billions of dollars per year might be influenced by it in just the near future, that current efforts cost a few million dollars per year and are often influential, and that there are many plausible ways to contribute. It also seems like things are likely to get better in the future, as more work is done.
This is a summary of Paul Penley’s points in a conversation on April 3, 2014, written by Katja with substantial help from the other participants.
Career decisions are high-stakes, but involve a lot of uncertainty. To help you make better decisions, we’ve gathered up the best advice we found on making good decisions in the face of high uncertainty, both from business and decision making science.
Here’s a summary of what we’ve found, organized into a checklist you can apply to high stakes decisions.
This feeds into our how to choose process at step seven.
Last updated: March 2016.
This page outlines our research into the predictors of job satisfaction.
Research process
To survey the literature, we familiarised ourselves with the latest work on positive psychology by reading all of ‘Flourish‘ and ‘Learned Optimism‘ by Seligman, ‘Stumbling on Happiness‘ by Gilbert, ‘Drive‘ by Pink, and several review papers. We also did a Google Scholar search for relevant terms, read two textbooks on organisational psychology (‘Work Psychology‘ by Arnold and Randall, and ‘The Handbook Principles of Organisational Behaviour’ by Locke (find a copy in this folder)), and two summaries of the job satisfaction literature in the OSH wiki.
We weighed the messages of the literature against our impression of common sense, placing more weight on meta-analyses and consensus positions among psychologists. For more on our general research process, see our research principles.
How robust are these findings?
There appears to be broad consensus that the job characteristics model is a good predictor of job satisfaction. The other factors in our list don’t have as wide consensus, but this page reflects our current synthesis of the evidence that we’ve read. With further research we can imagine adding or subtracting a factor or changing a factor’s relative importance. For example, we previously put less weight on personal fit as important for job satisfaction.
What do we mean by this strategy?
If you’ve got potential as an entrepreneur, attempt to found new effective nonprofit organisations or innovative for-profits that benefit their customers and create positive externalities.
Why is this strategy promising?
There’s a lot of scope for new high-impact organisations to be developed, but it’s risky to put these ideas into practice. If you’ve got the right skills, then this can be an opportunity to have an outsized impact.
In addition:
Which options are best within this strategy?
If interested in entrepreneurship,
What do we mean by this strategy?
There are many nonprofit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organization, it’s an option worth considering. By high-impact organisations we mean those that are well-run and work on an effective cause. For more, see here.
What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?
Taking a job at an organisation with a social purpose is probably the most popular way to have an immediate impact with your career. We think there’s a lot of truth in this view. There are many organisations that achieve great things that say they are constrained by an unusual type of human capital. For instance, GiveWell are constrained by people who are able to carry out their research. If you can provide this human capital, then you may have the opportunity to have an outsized impact.
However, it’s important to note some limitations. First, many organisations with a social purpose don’t have much social impact. So, it’s important to focus on working at effective organisations rather than just those with an explicitly social purpose. Second, the organisation may not be heavily constrained by the type of human capital you can offer. That’s why it’s important to focus on organisations where you’re a good fit.
Which options are best within this strategy?
What do we mean by this strategy?
Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills.
It can be particularly useful to experiment with career paths where most of the impact comes from the highest-performing people, such as research, politics, and entrepreneurship. This way, you can learn more about what it would take for you to make it to the top.
What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?
Which options are best within this strategy?
Find the options that have the highest exploration value, while also keeping your options open. See how to assess exploration value here.
What do we mean by this strategy?
Enter careers that enable you to build a package of generally valuable skills, connections and credentials – ‘career capital’.
What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?
At the start of their careers, most people can significantly boost their abilities to make a difference over the rest of their careers by first investing in themselves. We think this is common sense, but it has also been supported by our investigations into specific ways to build career capital. For instance, we’ve found many examples of people who have been able to boost their income 20-100% within six months by learning to program.
It’s important to focus on building career capital which will serve you well in many different scenarios, because it’s hard to predict where the best opportunities will be in the future. For instance, if you learn to program, then you’ll have decent employment prospects (including part-time and remote work), and you’ll also be in a better position to do research, entrepreneurship and contribute to non-profits.
Which options are best within this strategy?
If you want to maximise your self-development, focus on options that give you good opportunities to build career capital and are a strong personal fit. If there’s an area you think you could excel within, consider doing that, even if it’s not obviously “high-impact”.
We want to find the best career opportunities in the world. The problem is, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics lists several thousand career profiles, so we need ways to narrow down careers to find the most promising ones.
One way we narrow down careers is by identifying promising ‘strategies’ for impact. A strategy is a general method for having a big impact that applies to many different jobs.
On this page, we outline the main strategies we’ve identified so far and say which paths seem best within each. We’ve found all of these strategies useful for discovering and categorising the high impact paths we’ve investigated so far, as well as analysing career choices with the people we coach. We sketch our reasoning for each individual strategy below.
As part of our how to choose process, you can use these strategies to get ideas for new options and as a checklist to compare the options you’ve already identified. If you’re considering an option fits with two or three of these strategies, that’s a good sign – don’t follow one to the exclusion of all the others.
Table of Contents
Early in your career, it’s normally more important to focus on setting yourself up to have a big impact in the long-term rather than having an immediate impact (see more on our criteria page). In this section, we outline some strategies for building your long-run potential for impact.
The initial priority is to explore your options, so the first two strategies are about doing that. Then the next priority is to invest in your human capital, so the second two strategies are more focused on that.
Do something that (i) is difficult, so that it stretches your abilities,(ii) is different to what you’ve done before and (iii) intrigues you, so that you’re motivated to work on it. Some common examples are living abroad somewhere without English speakers, switching sectors or trying a startup.
There are many possibilities and it depends on your situation. Often we just stumble across interesting opportunities that are easy to ignore because they seem a little risky – someone offers you a job somewhere you hadn’t considered working; you get given the option to study abroad for a year; or you come up with an idea for an interesting science project. Don’t dismiss these out of hand!
You can also think through the different career worlds and try to explore the ones you know least about, for instance: academia; finance; industry; the entrepreneurial tech community; the policy world; the nonprofit sector; the arts; and working within government. If you’ve never experienced one of these worlds, consider giving it a go – you could start with something small like shadowing someone or doing an internship. Alternatively, consider working within a cause you know very little about.
One potential downside of this strategy is that if you do something completely random it can cut down your opportunities elsewhere. So, don’t act on this strategy to the complete exclusion of the others. As always, it’s also best to start small then scale up your efforts as you learn more. If you’re unsure about switching sector, first speak to people in the career, then volunteer or intern, and only then switch jobs.
Some career paths have extremely skewed outcomes. For instance, many people drop out of investment banking in the first couple of years, whereas others go on to earn tens of millions of dollars. Sometimes it’s possible to learn more about your how hard it would be for you to succeed in one of these careers by trying them out – perhaps first by doing something small like an internship, and then later working in them for a year or two. Since the potential outcomes are so skewed, this provides valuable information.
This strategy is best when long-term outcomes are very skewed, but it’s possible to learn about your prospects relatively quickly and cheaply.
Of the paths we’ve investigated so far, the most high-variance are:
Those that seem the quickest and cheapest to test are:
If you’ve discovered an activity in which you have a reasonable chance of being world-class if you work hard at it, consider doing it.
In our experience, we’ve found that being extremely good at something is often the best way to gain career capital, even if the area doesn’t immediately seem high-impact, because (i) it’s impressive, (ii) gives you access to other influential people, and (iii) means you’re developing world class skills. Being really good at something can also be a way to make a big difference, because in many fields the top performers produce most of the value.
For more reasons, see what we’ve written about the advantages of personal fit.
This depends entirely on the individual. See our ideas on how to find the options with the best personal fit on our personal fit page.
Find a skill-set that’s in demand and transferable, and spend several years developing expertise in that skill.
At the start of your career, it’s likely you can significantly boost your abilities to make a difference over the rest of your career by investing in building skills. We think this is common-sense, but it has also been supported by our investigations to date. For instance, we’ve found many examples of people who have been able to boost their income 20-100% within six months by learning to program.
In particular, focus on skills that are (i) in-demand and (ii) transferable. If the skills are in-demand, then you’re likely to have decent employment prospects, and when you’re more established, you’ll be able to direct these skills towards supporting good causes. If the skills are also transferable, then they keep your options open, which is important because it’s hard to predict where the best opportunities will be in the future.
So far, we’ve identified the following skill-sets that seem relatively in demand and transferable:
Other useful, transferable skills include:
You learn skills most quickly when you have good feedback, so you can measure your performance. On the job training and supporting, growth minded atmosphere are also important. Of the career paths we’ve investigated so far some that seem particularly good for skill-building include:
See all our articles on skills.
This concludes the section on strategies for building your long-run potential.
In the last section, we considered strategies for exploring your options and investing in yourself. Once you’ve done this, it’s time to move your focus towards using your skills and knowledge to make a difference. In this section, we consider four strategies for doing that.
There are many nonprofit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organisation or think you’re in a good position to found one, that’s an option worth considering. By high-impact organisations we mean those that are well-run and work on an effective cause. For more, see here.
Taking a job at or founding an organisation with a social purpose is probably the most popular way to have an immediate impact with your career. We think there’s a lot of truth in this view. There are many organisations that achieve great things which say they are constrained by an unusual type of human capital. For instance, GiveWell are constrained by people who are able to carry out their research. If you can provide this human capital, then you may have the opportunity to have an outsized impact.
However, it’s important to note some limitations. First, many organisations with a social purpose don’t have much social impact. So, it’s important to focus on working at effective organisations rather than just those with an explicitly social purpose. Second, the organisation may not be heavily constrained by the type of human capital you can offer. That’s why it’s important to focus on organisations where you’re a good fit.
We think founding organisations – entrepreneurship – is likely to offer even more scope for impact, though with higher risk. That’s because:
We haven’t yet formally reviewed any organisations, though we have written about several, and of those we think that working at GiveWell is a particularly attractive option. See all our articles on organisations.
If you’re considering pursuing this strategy, ask yourself:
If interested in entrepreneurship, see our profiles on tech entrepreneurship and founding effective global poverty focused nonprofits.
Some people are especially good at and interested in research – attempting to create new knowledge. If this is you, and have you have the opportunity to work in a field that seems particularly important, tractable and neglected, then this could be a way to have a large impact.
Most often, this strategy is carried out within academia, though it could also be in business, government, think tanks, or nonprofit research institutes.
Doing research is commonly regarded as a way to make a big difference, and we think this is broadly right: there are many areas of research with great humanitarian importance, and some researchers are many times more productive than others.1 This suggests that someone with high-potential as a researcher may be able to have an outsized impact. Some additional evidence includes:
However, we think there’s an important qualification to be made to the common sense view. We think it’s important to focus on particularly ‘high-potential areas’. That’s because although every field of research has something to contribute and it’s difficult to predict where the next crucial discoveries will be made, some areas seem to offer significantly more potential for impact than others.
Early career:
We think it’s important to keep your options open, since we’ll have better information about which areas are most promising in the future. This favors entering disciplines that develop strong, transferable skill-sets that are in demand, such as statistics, programming and machine learning. This suggests starting your career within applied maths, physics, economics or computer science if those subjects are a good fit.
It’s important to bear in mind the job prospects. Fields vary dramatically in both the difficulty of getting an academic job post-PhD, and in the difficulty of finding jobs outside of academia. Within philosophy, for example, there are more new PhDs than academic jobs, and a philosophy PhD doesn’t naturally build skills relevant for other sorts of career. This makes it hard to become an academic within philosophy even if you have a PhD from a very good program. In contrast, within economics the number of academic jobs matches the number of applications more closely, and economics PhDs are well-regarded within policy and business.
Another important consideration is the extent to which one can have an impact outside of academia. Again, economics PhDs are well-regarded within policy and business, to a much greater degree than philosophy PhDs are. This is a point in favor of applied maths, economics, certain types of psychology and computer science.
After you’ve done your PhD, you can start to focus more on your immediate impact:
Consider entering fields that will allow you to contribute to high-potential causes. These are fields that seem particularly important, tractable and neglected, thus hold more potential for impact than others.
Within a field, how can you pick the best research question? We’ve listed some ideas for heuristics, and asked this question to four senior biomedical researchers (upcoming).
See all our articles on research. So far, we have identified studying economics as a promising path.
We think those who are a good fit for research have:
Some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than the other strategies. These people can take a higher earning career and donate the money to effective organisations.
Since this path is more unusual, we’ve carried out extensive research into its pros and cons, and have published a paper on the topic. You can see a summary of our findings on our earning to give page.
Of the paths we’ve investigated so far, those that we’ve found to be highest earning (though also often risky and extremely competitive) are, in order:
Taking into account the level of competition, it’s also worth considering the following options:
In practice, you shouldn’t only consider the earnings of different paths as they stand today. You should also consider:
Don’t forget, you may be able to have more impact inspiring others to donate than donating yourself. That suggests it may be better to do something you enjoy where you’ll get along with your colleagues than simply earning the most money.
Earning to give seems best when:
By this strategy, we mean taking a job that gives you the ability to promote and unite people behind important ideas. These jobs often offer a combination of:
However, having one of these positions doesn’t guarantee that you’ll have a large impact. You also need to use the position to promote important, neglected ideas that can have a large impact if they spread.
Promoting important ideas is commonly regarded as a way to make a big difference, and many of those who are widely regarded as the most significant figures in history (e.g. as compiled by TIME) are political or cultural leaders, who were responsible for shaping the space of ideas. We think this is broadly right, and note some additional reasons in favor:
Of the paths we’ve investigated so far, those that we’ve found to provide the best advocacy potential are:
Note that working at a nonprofit focused on campaigning would fall under the first strategy.
If considering this path, some important questions to ask yourself are:
See all our articles on advocacy here.
We don’t think the above is an exhaustive list of the best strategies for making a difference with your career. We expect the list to grow and change over time. In particular, we would like to do more historical studies of high impact people and try to better understand what strategies they used. We’re also very unsure which strategies are most promising for different people, and would like to learn more by doing in-depth studies of individual career paths.
Of the strategies above, the first four strategies for immediate impact are very similar to the ‘five types of career’ (earning to give, influencer, improver, innovator and researcher) which we introduced right at the start of 80,000 Hours in 2011, so we feel relatively confident we’ll stick with them. The four strategies for building your long-run potential for impact, however, are newer, so more likely to change.
Another strategy that we’ve heard discussed is the idea of working in influential areas where you’re more focused on social impact than your colleagues, with the hope of spotting neglected opportunities to have a social impact. For instance, if a group of scientists were developing a new technology without much concern for the risk, there could be good opportunities for a socially motivated person to join the group and look out for cheap ways to reduce the risk that aren’t going to be taken otherwise.
We’ve also discussed the idea of taking an unglamorous role near a high-impact person with the idea of facilitating and amplifying their impact.
So far, however, we haven’t come across any concrete, widely applicable career paths that resemble either of these two strategies and are sufficiently distinct from advocacy or working at an organisation with good fit, so we haven’t included them.
Notes and References
This is a verbatim email conversation from the 26th of March 2014. Paul is a proponent of cause prioritization research. Here he explains his support of prioritization research, and makes some suggestions about how to do it.
Note: Paul is Katja’s boyfriend, so consider reading his inclusion as a relevant expert with a grain of salt.
This is a summary made by Katja of points made by Owen during a conversation on March 24 2014.
The Global Priorities Project is new, and intends to experiment for a while with different types of projects and then work on those that appear highest value in the longer term. Their work will likely address questions about how to prioritize, improve arguments around different options, and will produce recommendations. It will probably be mostly research, but also include for instance some policy lobbying. They will likely do some work with concrete policy-relevant consequences and also some work on general high level arguments that apply to many things. Most features of the project are open to modification after early experimentation.
There will be principally two audiences: policy makers and philanthropists, the latter including effective altruists and foundations. GPP has some access to moderately senior government and civil service policy people and are experimenting with the difficulty of pushing for high impact policies.
Research topics will be driven by a combination of importance and comparative advantage. GPP is likely to focus on prioritizing broad areas rather than narrower interventions, though these things are closely linked. It is good to keep an eye on object level questions to ensure that you are thinking about things the right way.
Owen is interested in developing frameworks for comparing things. This can produce value both in their own evaluations and through introducing metrics that others want to use, and so making proposals more comparable in general.
For someone with strong quantitative skills, we think this represents one of the best career opportunities available. The pay is exceptionally good enabling earning to give, you can develop technical skills valued in academia or technology, and the work is satisfying. We’ve seen numerous cases of mathematicians taking this path and being highly satisfied. The main caveat is that the industry faces many risks – these activities could become unprofitable due to regulation or competition – so it’s important to make sure you also build strong career capital.
Since publishing this profile, there has been further research on this cause. See our newer profile of the area.
What is this cause?
Global priorities research is activity aimed at working out which causes, interventions, organisations, policies, etc. do the most to make the world a better place. Organisations and projects within this cause include some policy think-tanks and some parts of economics. Within prioritisation research, we think the most high-priority area is long-run-focused cause-prioritisation. That is, research aimed at working out which causes do the most to make the world a better place in the long-run if we add more resources to them. Note that this research need not consist of detailed economic modelling. Global priorities research can also involve down-to-earth projects like investigating room for more funding or aggregating expert opinion. Organisations within the cause include the Copenhagen Consensus, GiveWell Labs, and the Global Priorities Institute.
Why do we think it’s high-priority?
We think global priorities research is a highly effective cause, because: (i) we think there are likely to be large differences in the effectiveness of different causes, (ii) people don’t have a good understanding of these differences, and (iii) without a better understanding, society is unlikely to take the best opportunities to do good. We also think working on this cause offers high value of information. Since there hasn’t been a large systematic attempt to evaluate causes before,
This is a very high-potential, though very competitive and high-risk path that can enable you to make a big difference through improving the operation of government and promoting important ideas. If you’re highly able, could tolerate being in the public eye and think you could develop a strong interest in politics, then we recommend learning more about this career to test your suitability.
If you have gained expertise in a relevant area of international development, there are opportunities to found a nonprofit that seeks to efficiently and transparently implement an evidence-backed intervention which is not already the focus of an existing nonprofit. Organisations like this have the potential to receive tens of millions of dollars from funders like the Gates Foundation and GiveWell within a couple of years, achieving a large impact.