The 80,000 Hours Career Guide — Find a fulfilling career that does good

Answer: Research shows that to have a fulfilling career, you should do something you’re good at that makes the world a better place. Don’t aim for a highly paid, easy job, or expect to discover your “passion” in a flash of insight. Find out the six key ingredients of fulfilling work.

Answer: With the right approach, you can make a major difference to the lives of others without changing jobs, or making a major sacrifice. You can do this by giving 10% of your income to the world’s poorest people, promoting important causes, or helping others to have a greater impact.Listen to learn about three ways to make a difference in any job.

Answer: Most people in rich countries who aim to do good work on health, poverty, and education in their home country. But health in poor countries is a bigger, more solvable problem, and only receives 4% of charitable donations. And we argue there are even bigger and more neglected issues, such as those involving existential risks and smarter-than-human AI.Here we explain what we’ve learnt about the world’s most urgent problems.

Answer: Especially early in your career, take options that will give you career capital — skills, connections, credentials, character, and runway that put you in a better position to make a difference. Examples include working at high-performing growing organisations, graduate studies in certain subjects such as economics, or learning concrete skills like information security or China expertise. Be careful with humanities PhDs, charity jobs, and vocational qualifications.Here we lay out many strategies for putting yourself in a better position.

Answer: Rather than try to pinpoint the single best option, accept that your plan is likely to change. But don’t try to “keep your options open”. Instead, think about your career in three stages: exploring, building career capital, and deploying that career capital to have an impact. Then, sketch out a plan A, but also a plan B and plan Z in case it doesn’t work out. Update your plan every couple of years.Here we explain how to make a flexible A/B/Z career plan.

Answer: Join a community of people working in the same area as you. You’ll get hundreds of connections at once. And two people working together effectively can achieve more than they could individually. Every community’s unique, so try out several and see which are best for you and your career. If you liked this guide, then you’ll probably share aims with lots of people in the effective altruism community, which we helped start back in 2011.Here we explain how being part of a community can help.

Lots of people say they want to “make a difference,” “do good,” “have a social impact,” or “make the world a better place” — but they rarely say what they mean by those terms.By getting clearer about your definition, you can better target your efforts. So how should you define social impact?

Over the last couple of decades, a large and growing body of research has emerged which shows that our decisions are far from rational. We did a survey of this research to find out what it means for your career decisions.

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We aim to list issues where each additional person can have the most positive impact. So we focus on problems that others neglect, which are solvable, and which are unusually big in scale, often because they could affect many future generations — such as existential risks.