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The secret to a fulfilling career!

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This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.

If you're fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren't sure how, our career guide can help you:

Get new ideas for fulfilling careers that do good

Compare your options

Make a plan you feel confident in

It's based on 10 years of research alongside academics at Oxford. We're a nonprofit, and everything we provide is free.
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Career guide

Our career guide covers everything you need to know about how to find a fulfilling career that does good, from why you shouldn't "follow your passion," to why medicine and charity work aren't always the best ways to help others.

It's full of practical tips and exercises, and at the end, you'll have a draft of your new career plan.
Read our career guide
Or read the two-minute summary, or get the guide as a free book.

Research

The issue you work on is probably the most important factor determining your impact. It's important to focus on issues that are not only big, but also neglected and tractable. We think some such issues even threaten the long-run future of humanity - making them especially high priority.

The highest impact paths are those that put you in the best position to tackle the most pressing problems. To help you get ideas for ways to contribute, we review some common options and list some unusual but especially high-impact paths.

The series covers our most important and novel research findings about how to increase the impact of your career, including: what "doing good" even means, why reducing existential risk might be humanity's biggest and most neglected priority, and how to avoid accidentally making things worse.

Podcast

In-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them.

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Job board

Our job board provides a curated list of publicly advertised vacancies that we think are particularly promising. We post roles that we believe are opportunities to either (and often both):

1. Contribute to solving key global problems.

2. Develop the career capital - skills, experience, knowledge, connections and credentials - to solve these problems in the future.

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Get 1-1 advice

If you're interested in working on one of the global problems we highlight, apply to speak with our team one-on-one for free. We can discuss which problem to focus on, look over your plan, introduce you to mentors, and suggest roles that suit your skills.
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Our community

Back in 2011, we helped found the effective altruism community. It's a group of people devoted to using evidence and reason to figure out the best ways to help others - whether through donations, political advocacy, or their careers. Learn more about the community and how it might be able to help you to have a more impactful career.
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Who are we?

We started 80,000 Hours when we were about to graduate from Oxford in 2011. Our aim was to provide the advice we wish we'd had back then: transparently explained, based on the best research available, and willing to ask the big questions. By doing this, we hope to get the next generation of leaders tackling the world's most pressing problems.
About us
How come this is all free?

We're an independent nonprofit funded by individual donors and philanthropic foundations. They donate to us so that we can help people have a greater positive impact on the world. We don't accept any corporate sponsorship or advertising fees.
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Who is this for?

Our aim is to help people tackle the world's biggest and most neglected problems, and our advice is aimed at people who have the good fortune to be able to make that their focus, as well as the security to change paths. Due to our limited capacity, some of our advice focuses on a narrow range of paths, and is especially aimed at talented college students and graduates aged 18-30, though many of the ideas we cover are relevant to everyone.
Our audience
What research is your advice based on?

Our advice is based on hundreds of expert interviews; what we've learned advising 4,000+ people one-on-one over 10 years; and where possible, the academic literature on global problems and career success. We're affiliated with the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford.
What is our advice based on?

Reader stories

Katie Hearsum

Katie was working at a bank, but she had a feeling that she wanted to use her career to help others - she just wasn't sure exactly how. She spoke to an 80,000 Hours advisor who helped her realise she could have an impact by helping to improve the long-term future and connected her to a network of people working in this area. After exploring her options, Katie realised she had a strong personal fit for operations work and accepted a role in operations at Longview Philanthropy, an organisation aimed at reducing the risks of a major global catastrophe. Katie was promoted to head of operations a year later.
Read more

Elika Somani

Elika started her career in global health, which she describes as "my first love, career wise". Over time, 80,000 Hours and the EA community helped her conclude that she could increase her expected impact by pivoting into biosecurity. She applied for, and was offered, the role of Fellow with the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. After speaking with an 80,000 Hours advisor, she decided to accept the job. She now conducts research on neglected problems in biosecurity, and also in clinical research ethics.
Read more

Ethan Perez

Ethan Perez was studying computer science when he came across 80,000 Hours, which convinced him that the risk from advanced artificial intelligence was a highly pressing problem. After speaking with an 80,000 Hours advisor, he decided to work full time on AI safety instead of pursuing a career in self-driving car technology. He went on to write his PhD thesis on fixing undesirable behaviour in language models and took a role as a research scientist working on AI safety at Anthropic.
Read more

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80,000 Hours is an Effective Ventures project. Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) (EV UK) is a charity in England and Wales (with registered charity number 1149828, registered company number 07962181, and is also a Netherlands registered tax-deductible entity ANBI 825776867). Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. (EV US) is a section 501(c)(3) organization in the USA (EIN 47-1988398). EV UK and EV US are separate charities that collaborate closely under the "Effective Ventures" name.

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This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. If you're fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren't sure how, we can help

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The most popular TED Talks of all time | TED Talks

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Are schools killing creativity? What makes a great leader? How can I find happiness? These 25 talks are the ones that you and your fellow TED fans just can't stop sharing. (Updated January 2023)

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Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.

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A Mindset Shift to Continue Supporting the Most Frustrating Kids

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A Mindset Shift to Continue Supporting the Most Frustrating Kids

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How do we really feel about our most challenging students? Most of us will say "frustrated" as a first reaction. But after we dig a little bit under the layer of frustration, what's the next emotion, the truer emotion? I asked a room of educators this question at the Educon conference earlier this year. I heard: Worried. Hopeless. Lost. Powerless. Stuck. Many of us feel a deep sense of responsibility and care for "our kids." When we see a student struggling and believe that we can't help, the powerlessness can feel overwhelming. If we don't do the work to transform that emotion in a healthy way, it can instead become frustration and irritation, and begin to chip away at our empathy.

This frustration infuses all our interactions with and about that student, which in turn communicates a lack of care to the student and family, heightening what may have already felt like an insurmountable wall. We say we believe in every child, care for every child, support every child -- but when we let our challenging emotions fester, we struggle to communicate that to others -- or even believe it ourselves.

I've gotten stuck in this trap more than once. It was my student who jolted me out of this cycle when she said, "You don't really care about kids, you're just here for the money." My instinct was to laugh, but I quickly realized that what my student was trying to tell me was that she didn't feel like I cared about her. I was able to use that moment to let her know that I did indeed care, and we were able to have a great conversation about how teachers can feel frustrated sometimes and how we're all human. That conversation ended up strengthening our relationship and my work with her.

My most challenging student is not inherently challenging as a human being -- but I need to own that it's challenging for me to work with them. Once I take responsibility for my own emotions, I am now in a position to transform them.
WHAT CAN I DO TO CHANGE THIS?
It's not about not feeling hopeless, defeated and powerless in the face of challenging student behaviors. These are normal responses we can expect to have as humans in relationship with other humans who are struggling. Instead, we need to own the emotions and work to make meaning of them. This means taking the time to dig into questions like:

Why am I feeling this way?

Could this feeling give me insight into how my student is feeling?

What does it mean about me that I feel so frustrated, lost or hopeless? Does it change my conception of myself as a teacher, as a person?

What do my students' challenges bring up for me? How does my own history influence my responses?

What is the venue for these questions? In an ideal world, teachers would make space for grappling with these questions as part of their scheduled job responsibilities. At my school, we take time formally and informally to delve into our own emotional response to the work, to gain perspective, to check our assumptions and stay grounded.

Informally, this looks like maintaining a school culture where the students' strengths are at the center. We have an informal "no venting" policy, preferring instead to problem-solve. It's common to find teachers in each other's classrooms at the end of the day comparing notes and talking through a challenging situation: "Hey, was he upset in your class today, too? What did you do about it? Do you have any sense of what's going on for him?" We encourage this peer consultation and make time for it.

Formally, we have several mandatory and optional group opportunities for staff to focus on wellness and making meaning of the work. Once a month we have wellness groups where staff choose a personal wellness goal for the year and use the group to stay on track and get ideas. We also do periodic case conferences, focusing on one particular student, where we walk through what behaviors are coming up, what we understand to be at the root of those behaviors, how we're feeling working with that student, and what we should do going forward. We make the choice to invest our time as a school doing this rather than focusing staff meetings on other topics, and we see the benefit for students when teachers are on the same page about supporting them.
WHAT'S NEXT?
We will never lose the need for meaning-making, because working with humans will always be inherently complex and bring up emotions. However, there are some proactive things we can do to smooth the path for ourselves.

Proactively plan for being a person with emotions. Expect that the work will be challenging and that sometimes you will feel awful, and accept that this is a normal part of a human-centered job. What are some ways you do this?

Build in support systems. Find the people, groups or strategies that will proactively support you and will respond to you with kindness and understanding when the going gets rough. This might be nurturing your personal friendships or relationships, strengthening connections with co-workers, my supervisor or other folks at work, or going to my own counselor or therapist. If I'm worried about respecting my students' confidentiality, I remind myself to turn my focus back to my own emotions: I don't need to share my students' names or stories in order to talk about how frustrated or hopeless I'm feeling, and work through those emotions.

Develop understanding. We can better make meaning when we better understand the underlying issues at stake. Seek out information about trauma, chronic stress, the impacts of racism and discrimination, and other systems at play with your particular population. I incorporate these topics into my school's ongoing professional development (which staff design and facilitate), and also use my own personal learning community online to find these resources.

Forgive yourself: Above all, we need to be gentle with ourselves. This self-forgiveness serves to remind us that we also must be gentle with our students, offering a fresh start each day and providing opportunities to repair and rebuild our relationships after conflict

When I feel like I just don't have time to slow down and do this emotional work, I remind myself that an investment in this work pays off tenfold in my ability to stay grounded, not to get so stressed out, and most importantly, to be a better help to my students who need it most.

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A Mindset Shift to Continue Supporting the Most Frustrating Kids | KQED

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How do we really feel about our most challenging students? Most of us will say "frustrated" as a first reaction. But after we dig a little bit under the layer of frustration, what's the next emotion, the truer emotion? I asked a room of educators this question at the Educon conference earlier this year.

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Be The Change You Want to See By Shifting Traditional High School

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Be The Change You Want to See By Shifting Traditional High School

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Catlin Tucker confers with a student during N.E.W. school. ( Katrina Schwartz)

Great ideas and extraordinary teaching happen in public school classrooms all over the country, but these pockets of innovation often don't get the attention they deserve. More often the schools held up as models for the future of learning started with a carefully articulated vision around change, a hand-picked staff, and even some startup capital. Changing the traditional approaches to teaching and learning that have been in place for decades within an existing school is extremely difficult work.

But passionate teachers and leaders are doing just that. Catlin Tucker has been teaching at Windsor High School for 14 years. She started out as the kind of teacher who had every lesson planned out to the minute; the kind of teacher who assigned lots of writing at home, graded everything meticulously, and had very high expectations of students. She was in control of her classroom, but she found that often her students were disengaged.

Over several years she began to experiment with using technology to give her students more ways to engage with material and more choice over how they demonstrated their understanding. But the more she tried to innovate within her standard high school English classroom, the more she felt that the structure and system itself weren't serving kids well. She wanted to shake it up even more.

My new classroom! Let the movement, exploration, collaboration & creation begin! #BackToSchool pic.twitter.com/XWhqzLM1X3

- Catlin Tucker (@Catlin_Tucker) August 18, 2016

"I did feel like in some ways I had reached the edges of what I could do that was different in an English classroom," Tucker said. She was even thinking about leaving teaching to become a professional development consultant full time - something she does part time now - until she saw Will Richardson keynote an all-staff professional development day at her school.

"I sat there and he just spoke to me, to everything that concerns me about education, and the way we're shuttling kids through classes and losing so many of them, and how we have to reimagine learning for kids of this generation." Tucker said. She immediately went to her principal and asked to pilot a very different type of learning experience within Windsor High School.
N.E.W. SCHOOL
Windsor works on a "core" model where one group of students share the same English, science and history teacher as a way to create smaller communities within the big comprehensive high school. This schedule allowed Tucker to team up with Marika Neto, a science teacher, to offer the Next Evolution of Work-based Learning core, or N.E.W. school.

The two teachers share a mix of 60 freshmen and sophomores, teaching them English, science and a technology elective in an interdisciplinary way. Tucker and Neto develop themed units that connect concepts of the science curriculum with the books they are reading and the writing they are doing. For example, in a mental health unit students learned about the neurobiology of mental health disorders and applied that understanding to their reading of "Romeo and Juliet."

Each student psychoanalyzed a character, using research to back up claims about how the character's actions and words indicate they may have had a specific mental disorder. At the same time, students also had to do a project educating a specific audience on some aspect of mental health. Students could work together or alone, and had a lot of freedom to choose how and what they would dive into.

For a Mental Health unit project these girls raised $800 for homeless packs. The power of project-based learning! @Catlin_Tucker #NEWSchool pic.twitter.com/dSrpNKsaD2

- Marika Neto (@MarikaNeto) December 16, 2016

One student made an infographic in Spanish and English to educate the Spanish-speaking community about the dangers of depression and where people can get help locally. Another group wanted to build a life-size mannequin that could show what anxiety looks like in the body. They weren't sure how to realize their vision, so they formally reached out to the engineering teacher for help programming a device that would light up when certain parts of the brain trigger or when the heartbeat accelerates.

"These girls were never interested in programming and now they're doing it on their off-time just to complete this project," said Marika Neto. She's been amazed at how deeply students are willing to examine a topic when they have the freedom to choose something that interests them and can show their learning in various ways. That's especially apparent in science; many students claimed they used to hate science, but are loving it the way Neto teaches.
THE SCHEDULE
Tucker and Neto have their N.E.W. students only every other day, but on core days students are with them for a 4½-hour block that the teachers can program however they want. The co-teachers put together a slide deck for every day with each activity, links to resources, and transition times. Students are responsible for looking at the deck and independently transitioning between activities. Sometimes half the students will work on a science lesson while the other half work on a writing assignment. Other times all 60 kids have "My time" to work on anything they need to get done.

The effect is that there's no herding students from room to room based on a bell schedule. Visitors to class don't always know what students are working on unless they ask, and often one student will be doing different work from her neighbor.

Tucker and Neto don't formally assign homework, but they try to give lots of work time in class. And students often do extra work on their projects at home if they haven't been focused in class or they aren't satisfied with their work. Tucker has also tried as much as possible not to collect and grade work at home. Instead, she synchronously edits student writing in Google Docs. She believes that giving students real-time actionable feedback as they are drafting benefits them more than when she stamps a grade on at the end. Too often students never look at that feedback again.

And because Tucker and Neto have complete control of the schedule of N.E.W. core, they can invite outside experts in, plan field trips and generally enrich what happens in the classroom by connecting students to other resources at Windsor High or out in the community at large.
BREAKING DEPENDENCE
One of the big goals of the N.E.W. program is to create a learning environment where students are empowered and supported to be independent learners. That can be a challenge for students arriving to the program with eight or nine years of experiences with teachers who tell them exactly how to do well. Students in the N.E.W. program struggled with the freedom of the program at first and asked for more direct instruction.

"In middle school it was more like you sit down, they teach you, you memorize everything, you do your work and that's it, you're out," said Natali, a freshman in the program. "But here it was more, I wouldn't say self-taught, but as a student you really had to buckle down yourself if you really wanted to get it done."

One of the big ways Tucker and Neto are trying to build student ownership of learning is through the grading system. They are aware that any pedagogical approach must be s upported by an assessment policy that furthers the same goals. The grading policy in a classroom can easily send a conflicting message to students if teachers don't think it through carefully.

At the beginning of each unit Tucker identifies the key English and technology standards and Neto picks the science ones. They put those targets in a spreadsheet with columns for students to self-evaluate on each skill, as well as columns for teachers to give feedback and evaluation. Every week students have time to reflect on the work they've done and to give themselves a grade 1-4 that indicates how well they believe they are meeting the standard. Crucially, they also have to say why they believe that grade is appropriate and link to work samples as evidence.

"The doc is meant to be an ongoing silent conversation between the two of us," Tucker said. If she goes through and gives a student a 2, that's not the end of the conversation. The student can then take that feedback, make changes to the work, update his column and ask for the teacher to look again. This process encourages students to constantly reflect on what they are doing well, what they can improve, and to actively use teacher feedback to revise work.

"Throughout the unit they're constantly being asked to look at their body of work, look at the skills we're targeting, and identify what pieces reflect their growth or their proficiency, or their developing proficiency in relation to a particular standard," Tucker said.

Since Windsor is a traditional public school, Tucker and Neto have to report out grades every six weeks. At that time they conduct grading interviews with each student in which the student presents the grade she thinks she deserves and evidence to support that claim. The teacher comes with her own grade and evidence, and the two have a conversation about it.

"The first time I did a grading interview I was like so nervous," said Josh, a sophomore student. "But then by the second time it was much more relaxed. And I'm like, OK, I'm just showing what I've done and I should be proud of it." He appreciates that he has a voice in the process and that his grade isn't arbitrarily decided by his teacher.

"I think those conversations were some of the scariest things we've asked them to do because they're not asked to think about their learning that way, articulate where they're at in their learning, and what they think their grade should be," Tucker said. Students are having to retrain themselves to use those types of metacognitive skills, which is a big shift for them.

A conversation after a grade-less interview "It is nice to not be defined by doing bad on one assignment; instead the focus is on my growth"

- Marika Neto (@MarikaNeto) September 28, 2016

This approach has also been an adjustment for parents who generally were educated in a more traditional system. They have become accustomed to classrooms where every assignment is graded, and if their child misses an assignment or performs poorly on a test it can start to create a hole in their grade. And, for parents whose children did well in the traditional system, but are adjusting to the independence and autonomy of N.E.W. school, all the changes can be a little scary.

"She was struggling at the beginning," said Carrie Carstensen of her daughter. "And I thought, how is this going to look on her report card? Are her grades going to go down because this is something completely different and new and challenging?'"

Ultimately, Carstensen decided she'd rather her daughter learn the content deeply, even if her grades aren't as strong, in the hopes that the many other skills she's learning in the hands-on, project-based and tech-savvy program will serve her well later. It doesn't hurt that her daughter is much more excited about school now.

Other parents were thrown by the idea that students can go back, revise and improve an initial grade. While foreign to many parents at first, it was not unwelcome.

"They're trying to teach them that you might start off with a 1 and you're a straight-A student because there's so much room to grow," said Toni Rooney, a freshman parent. "And so when they give them increases in their number, I feel like it means more to them."

Rooney has been impressed with the passion for learning that the N.E.W. core has brought out in her daughter, Brooke. While Brooke was never a struggling student, she also didn't particularly like school. Now Brooke is excited to talk with her mom about what she's learning, how she's tackling projects and the improvements she's made.

"My other son spends hours sitting at his desk doing homework and I don't think he's getting more from his education," said Dianne Wagner, Josh's mom. Josh has a twin brother who is in a more traditional honors-track core. Wagner likes that Josh's schoolwork not only excites him, but that he's becoming a well-rounded person who can collaborate, juggle project deadlines on his own, communicate about his work and take ownership. And, she likes that when he's home from school he has time to help out with chores and hang out with his family because he's not so stressed out by how much homework he has.

"What they do here in N.E.W. core is they figure out how to apply the knowledge that they need to learn to the life that they have in front of them, and connecting those dots makes that information more valuable," Wagner said.
ROOM TO STRETCH
Tucker and Neto originally conceived of the N.E.W. core as a way to reach the many students for whom school is "not super stimulating." Connecting the curriculum to the real world, giving students choice, making science more hands-on and fun, and building in a lot of collaboration are all ways these teachers are trying to shake up the traditional model in order to re-engage kids who haven't experienced a lot of success in school or who are already checked out.

And while there are many students in the program who are thriving in that new environment when they might not have elsewhere, one surprise has been how well the model works for students who also excel at traditional school. Tucker initially worried that having such a broad array of learners in one hectic space would make it hard to challenge her high-flyers, but they've told her the opposite.

"I have had experiences in past classes where I would do an assignment and I wasn't super excited about it, but I would still get an A," said sophomore Samantha Moberly. Samantha is the kind of student who would probably do well anywhere, but she says the freedom she has to pursue her interests motivates her much more than a grade (although she still cares about those, too). "I'm actually working to get to a point where I'm really satisfied with my work. And because I'm grading myself, I'm not just stopping at a point where I know I would get a certain grade. I go until I'm satisfied," she said.

That attitude has allowed her to pursue some impressive projects. In science, Neto gave groups of students corn on the cob, canned corn or packaged corn, and told them they needed to design a lab from the ground up under the theme of nutrition. The "Iron Chef Lab" required students to come up with an interesting question, write a hypothesis, develop lab procedures and carry out the experiment. On top of that, Neto tasked students with identifying specific skills they would need for their labs so she could run skills stations to support them.

Samantha's group had packaged corn, so they decided to test for the effects of Bisphenol A (BPA) - commonly found in plastic - on their corn. They couldn't buy BPA, so they asked the AP Chemistry teacher for help extracting BPA from a plastic water bottle so they could use it in their lab.

"They are thinking outside the box and they're being creative and they're having that natural inquiry and they're not just looking to check the box," Neto said. Ultimately, the BPA didn't have any effect on the corn, but the group learned a lot along the way. In their reflection, students proposed various other ways they would do the experiment if they had different materials and more time. Needless to say, Samantha's group won the Iron Chef Lab.

Be The Change You Want to See By Shifting Traditional High School

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Be The Change You Want to See By Shifting Traditional High School

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Great ideas and extraordinary teaching happen in public school classrooms all over the country, but these pockets of innovation often don't get the attention they deserve. More often the schools held up as models for the future of learning started with a carefully articulated vision around change, a hand-picked staff, and even some startup capital.