The 80000 Hours Career Guide — Find a fulfilling career that does good
Business & Economics Podcasts
Coming September 4: an audio version of the 2023 80,000 Hours Career Guide also available on Amazon, Audible, and free on our website (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/). It contains 11 chapters, from 'What makes for a dream job?' to 'Which jobs help people the most?' to 'What’s the best way to gain connections?' It also has 9 appendices on a range of topics like 'All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job' and 'is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good?'
Location:
United States
Description:
Coming September 4: an audio version of the 2023 80,000 Hours Career Guide also available on Amazon, Audible, and free on our website (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/). It contains 11 chapters, from 'What makes for a dream job?' to 'Which jobs help people the most?' to 'What’s the best way to gain connections?' It also has 9 appendices on a range of topics like 'All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job' and 'is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good?'
Language:
English
Episodes
Introduction: Why read this guide?
9/3/2023
You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend one or two of those hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.
Duration:00:04:59
Part 1: What makes for a dream job?
9/3/2023
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.
Duration:00:23:54
Part 2: Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says.
9/3/2023
Answer: Many common ways to do good, such as becoming a doctor, have less impact than you might first think. Other, more unconventional options, have allowed certain people to achieve an extraordinary impact (including one particular Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet military).
Duration:00:10:30
Part 3: Three ways anyone can make a difference, no matter their job
9/3/2023
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.
Duration:00:15:16
Part 4: Want to do good? Here’s how to choose an area to focus on.
9/3/2023
Answer: To maximise your impact, work on areas (1) that are large in scale, (2) that others neglect, and (3) where it’s possible to make progress. Many people fail to compare the scale of different problems, work on the same problems as everyone else, and support programmes with no evidence of impact.
In this article we explain how to compare global problems.
Duration:00:13:12
Part 5: The world’s biggest problems and why they’re not what first comes to mind
9/3/2023
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.
Duration:00:30:12
Part 6: Which jobs help people the most?
9/3/2023
Answer: When we think of jobs that help people, medicine, teaching, and charity work are what first come to mind. But these are not always the highest-impact options. To help the most people, think broadly about the paths where you can make the biggest contribution, including research, communications and community-building, taking high-earning jobs to donate to charity, government and policy, and organisation-building.
Here we lay out five types of high-impact career.
Duration:00:36:57
Part 7: Which jobs put you in the best long-term position?
9/3/2023
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.
Duration:00:40:14
Part 8: How to find the right career for you
9/3/2023
Answer: Don’t expect to figure out what you’re best at right away, especially through introspection, going with your gut, or career tests. Instead, think like a scientist: make best guesses, clarify your key uncertainties, and then investigate those uncertainties by doing research and cheap tests. Early in your career, consider trying out several paths, and when in doubt, aim high.
In this episode we suggest ways to find the best career for you.
Duration:00:33:05
Part 9: How to make your career plan
9/3/2023
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.
Duration:00:23:04
Part 10: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job
9/3/2023
Answer: Don’t just send out your CV in response to job listings. Get leads through your connections, and prove that you can do the work by actually doing some. When you get an offer, negotiate.
Here we offer a summary of all the best advice on how to get the job you want.
Duration:00:28:45
Part 11: One of the most powerful ways to improve your career — join a community.
9/3/2023
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.
Duration:00:11:28
The end: A cheery final note — imagining your deathbed
9/3/2023
We sum up the whole guide in a few minutes.
Duration:00:04:10
Appendix A: The meaning of making a difference
9/3/2023
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?
Duration:00:05:26
Appendix B: All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job
9/3/2023
The trouble with self-help advice is that it’s often based on barely any evidence.
Much other advice is just one person’s opinion, or useless clichés. But at 80,000 Hours, we’ve found that there are a number of evidence-backed steps that anyone can take to become more productive and successful in their career, and life in general. And as we saw in an earlier article, people can keep improving their skills for decades.
Duration:00:58:55
Appendix C: Four biases to avoid in career decisions
9/3/2023
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.
Duration:00:06:21
Appendix D: How to make tough career decisions
9/3/2023
Duration:00:18:39
Appendix H: Career review summaries
9/3/2023
As part of our research, we’ve evaluated different careers: how likely people are to succeed in them, how much good they could do in them, and how to enter them.
Duration:01:23:35
Appendix G: Additional resources
9/3/2023
Duration:00:06:06