Free, personalised, and impact-focused career advising

We’ve helped over 5,000 people choose a focus, make connections, and find work that makes a difference.

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How we can help

Whether you’re changing careers, just starting out, or are already on an impactful path but have questions or uncertainties, our advisors are here to help. Here’s what we can do on the free one-on-one call:

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Review your options

We help you evaluate causes and high-impact career options.

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Make introductions

We can introduce you to experts and hiring managers in relevant fields.

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Suggest next career steps

We'll provide guidance on practical next steps, such as suggesting promising job opportunities.

Our advisees currently work at:

Google Deepmind logoAI Safety Institute logoUS Government logoCenter for AI Safety logoAnthropic logoOpen Philanthropy logoGood Food Institute logoRAND logoGiveWell logoNuclear Threat Initiative logo
Advisor Sudhanshu speaking with woman
Sudhanshu Kasewa is an advisor at 80,000 Hours.

Who we can help

We’re most helpful for people who:

  • Take an analytical approach to social impact and career choice.
  • Aim to use their career to do the most good, and are serious about promoting welfare over the long term. (You can read more about what we think it means to help others as effectively as possible on our advanced series page.)
  • Are interested in the problems we think are most pressing, which you can read about in our problem profiles.

Some people we've helped

Of the thousands of people we’ve advised, 95% would recommend us to a friend and 76% said they changed their career plans to something higher impact.

Ethan Perez

The advising team is incredibly well-researched and connected in AI safety. Their advice is far more insightful, personalized, and impact-focused than most of what I got from Google, self-reflection, or the peers or mentors I would typically go to.

Ethan Perez
Research Scientist
Anthropic
Rosie Campbell

As a direct result of advising, I found a role as Assistant Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, where I will contribute to shaping provably beneficial AI.

Rosie Campbell
Policy Frontiers Lead
OpenAI
Jessica Almy

A huge thank you for offering this service! University career counselors tend to focus on finding job listings, networking, and tweaking a resume — but the big issues I was able to explore with 80,000 Hours were far more important to me in thinking about my career over the next 30 years.

Jessica Almy
Policy Director
The Good Food Institute
Dr Zac Kenton

I was introduced to some experts in the field and others who were interested in following a similar path. These introductions have played a big part in me obtaining an internship at MILA. 80,000 Hours also helped me to be awarded an EA grant for pursuing research related to AI safety.

Dr Zac Kenton
Research Scientist
DeepMind
Cullen O'Keefe

80,000 Hours advising showed me that I could pursue a career that was both ethically and personally rewarding. They showed me that my job horizons — and therefore opportunities to do good — were broader than I had thought, even with my heavy involvement in effective altruism.

Cullen O'Keefe
Director of Research
Institute for Law & AI

Apply for free, personalised, and impact-focused career advising

How it works

1. Apply

Fill in our brief application form. Tell us your current thoughts on career options so we can work out how to help best.

2.Prepare

If we think we can help, we’ll send you a link to book your call and ask for some extra information.

3.Have a one-on-one call

You’ll have a video call to talk through your career with one of our advisors and work out next steps.

4.Stay in touch

In some cases, your advisor will stay in touch with you after the call if they can continue supporting your career.

Our advising team

Daniel Dewey

Daniel Dewey

Daniel has been working on reducing existential risk from AI since 2011. Before joining 80,000 Hours, he was an independent AI alignment researcher, a program officer at Open Philanthropy, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and a software engineer at Google. Daniel has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Huon Porteous

Huon Porteous

Huon studied maths and philosophy at the Australian National University, where he was a core organiser for the university EA club. He worked in management consulting at a boutique firm before joining 80,000 Hours, and wrote his Honours Thesis on moral uncertainty.

Laura González Salmerón

Laura González Salmerón

Laura joined us after three years of working as a buy-side equity analyst. In a previous life, she was a PhD student at Oxford, where she researched representations of science and technology in fiction. Outside 80,000 Hours she writes, hosts a Spanish podcast, and hoards games she never has time to play.

Matt Reardon

Matt Reardon

Matt came to 80,000 Hours after three years of litigating for a top global law firm. Before that, he led Harvard Law School’s Effective Altruism student group. He continues to support EA groups at law schools and EA community building in the legal field more broadly, in part through his organisation of the Legal Topics in Effective Altruism virtual programme.

Sudhanshu Kasewa

Sudhanshu Kasewa

Sudhanshu has been a consultant with giant multinationals, a corporate soft-skills trainer, a research engineer at a startup, and a PhD student in robotics. He’s worked in a variety of contexts, including manufacturing, financial services, and healthcare, and has degrees in mathematics, management, and machine learning.

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FAQ

We aim to work with the people we can most help to have a great impact. This means we look for people who:

  • Make social impact one of their main career goals.
  • Take an analytical approach to social impact and career choice.
  • Are already somewhat familiar with the basic principles of social impact career choice as presented in our career guide.
  • Are interested in working on our pressing problems.
  • Have the ability to excel in a challenging career.

We’re aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people’s willingness to call attention to their own achievements. We’d especially encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply.

Our donors cover the cost of this service because they see it as an opportunity for impact — many people we advise go on to have a greater impact over the course of their career than they would have otherwise.

To get the most out of the call, it’s helpful for you to have some familiarity with some of 80,000 Hours’ content or the wider effective altruism movement. We find that it’s best for people to absorb these ideas at their own pace before talking. But we know there’s so much you could read and want to emphasise that you don’t need to have thought about everything before applying. There’s a list of resources you might have read in the application form — but don’t worry, we don’t expect you to have read all of those.

If you aren’t that familiar with 80,000 Hours’ content, we recommend you learn more before applying. For example, you can:

  • Read our career guide, which covers all our key ideas on how to have a high-impact career.
  • Listen to our 10-part podcast series Effective Altruism: An Introduction. Together these give you the most essential information you need about some of the world’s most pressing problems, and how to work out how to do the most good.
  • Check out a book like The Precipice by philosopher Toby Ord, which discusses the catastrophic risks that threaten the future of humanity and the reasons for taking those issues really seriously.
  • Sign up for a free online introductory or in-depth EA programme. The programmes run regularly and they are a great way to learn more about the ideas alongside others.

As a rule of thumb, if you’ve done at least one of the above and the ideas have resonated with you, then it might be worth applying to speak with our team now.

You do not need to have a worked out career plan before applying. In fact, talking with us earlier in the process of planning might be better, so that we can help you answer some key uncertainties and work out where to focus your efforts.

If you have already done a lot of career planning, we’ll be happy to talk through your thoughts. But as long as you can write a couple of paragraphs in the application form setting out your current thinking (even if you have a lot of uncertainties) then that is enough for applying.

We speak with people at a wide range of different points in their career, including people who are mid- or late-career. We work closely with many organisations that are working on the problems we think are most pressing. They are often keen to find people with significant experience, and we might be able to flag particularly relevant roles — especially if you’re willing to be flexible.

We understand that it can seem intimidating to apply, but we’d encourage you to give it a try if you think it might be helpful for you. If it helps, you can check out this Twitter thread from one of our former advisors, Habiba, about the range of people she talks to in advising.

In particular, we know that things like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can often make people less willing to put themselves forward or call attention to their achievements. We really encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply — we want our service to help people as much as possible.

We usually get back to people within about two weeks of applying. If you have an urgent decision to make, we encourage you to put that in your application, and email [email protected].

We sincerely regret that we can’t advise everyone who applies. We read every application individually and are thankful that you took the time to apply. It’s really touching to read about people who have come across 80,000 Hours and are excited about using their careers to help others.

We aim to talk to the people we think we can help the most. But even if we can’t talk to you, we often suggest someone else you can talk to or provide more resources (such as a free book!).

If we can’t speak with you, that does not mean we think you won’t have a highly impactful career. Whether we can be helpful to you sometimes depends on contingent factors like whether one of our advisers happens to know of a role or introduction right now that might be a good fit for you. Also, unfortunately, it’s impossible for us to know everyone’s situation well enough to be completely sure we’re speaking to the right people. We try to do the best with the information we have from the application form but we might still make mistakes that aren’t a reflection on you at all.

You’re very welcome to re-apply, particularly if your situation changes. In the meantime, it might be worth reading our career guide. If you’re trying to plan your career, you can use our career planning worksheet. And if you have an upcoming career decision, take a look at our career decision tool.

You can also get involved in our community to get help from other people trying to do good with their careers.

You can choose which advisor to book a call with when we send you the details for the call.

We speak with people at a wide range of different points in their career, including students. We can often be useful even if you don’t yet have a firm idea of what career seems like a good fit for you.

For example, we might be able to help you think about what directions seem most promising to try out first, talk through what subjects to study, suggest promising opportunities you can do during your vacations, and connect you with more people to build your network.

Working out what problem to work on is an important factor in our approach to planning an impactful career, but we know it is a difficult question to form a view on. Talking this through with people is one of the most helpful things we can do on our calls. So if you’re unsure about which problem to work on, don’t let that stop you applying.

If you think you’d find it useful, yes! While we don’t guarantee additional calls to people we’ve already spoken to, and often speak to people only once, we think multiple calls can be really valuable in the right circumstances.

In general, we’re most excited to speak to people a second time when something about their situation has changed. For example:

  • You might have changed your mind about which cause is most important for you to work on, so the plan from the first call no longer applies.
  • You might have planned to do some exploring after the first call, and now, having narrowed down your options, be struggling to choose between the final few.
  • You might have started a programme of study after speaking to us, and now be about to finish it.
  • It could be something else entirely!

As with an initial application, even if we don’t think we’ll be especially helpful a second time, we might still be able to connect you with someone else to speak to, or highlight other resources or opportunities.

Even if you’re very involved in the effective altruism community, you may find it useful to spend some focused time talking to an advisor about your career questions. We have helped people who are already highly engaged with the community by talking through their uncertainties about their career plans as well as introducing them to potential new employers, funders, and mentors. We can also double check you haven’t missed any of our relevant research.