The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far
The highest-impact career for you is the one that allows you to make the biggest contribution to solving one of the world’s most pressing problems. On this page, we describe skills to build early in your career that can help you make a bigger contribution. Plus, we have reviews of 20 or so more specific career paths we think are especially impactful given the problems we think are most pressing.
These recommendations are based on 10 years of research and experience advising people — use them to get ideas for next steps and new career paths you might have missed.
Top skill sets for tackling global problems
Early career, we recommend you focus on building useful skills. So which skills are most useful for solving important global problems? Here’s our list.
We suggest you choose between these primarily based on personal fit. Click through to the profiles to see why we recommend them, concrete advice for how to build each one, and how you can work out which is the best fit for you.
Learn to get things done in the world’s largest and most important institutions (in particular national governments), which often play a crucial role in tackling global problems.
Help build and boost great organisations doing important work through skills like management, operations, legal and financial oversight, entrepreneurship, and fundraising.
Convey important ideas and information in a compelling way in order to help others focus on the right things and work more effectively.
Learn programming and then apply your skills to build useful software or conduct analyses relevant to pressing problems.
Learn about China and use that experience to help improve global coordination in crucial areas.
Gain relevant — but sometimes niche — knowledge in important areas, like vaccinology, AI hardware, or development economics.
Keep in mind that this list isn’t exhaustive. Plus, almost any skill can be worth pursuing if you’re sufficiently good at it. You should look for the skills that have the best balance of being useful and being something you could get great at.
The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far
These are guides to some more specific career paths that seem especially high impact. Most of these are difficult to enter, and it’s common to start by investing years in building the skills above before pursuing them. But if any might be a good fit for you, we encourage you to seriously consider it.
We’ve ranked these paths roughly in terms of our take on their expected impact, holding personal fit for each fixed and given our view of the world’s most pressing problems. But your personal fit matters a lot for your impact, and there is a lot of variation within each path too — so the best opportunities in one lower on the list will often be better than most of the opportunities in a higher-ranked one.
The development of AI could transform society. Help increase the chance it’s positive by doing technical research to find ways to prevent AI systems from carrying out dangerous behaviour.
Improve organisational, political, and societal decision-making about AI to reduce catastrophic risks.
Help reduce the risk of a global biological catastrophe, like an engineered pandemic much worse than COVID-19.
Help secure important organisations from attacks and prevent emerging technologies like AI and biotech from being misused, stolen, or tampered with.
Use knowledge of a key input into advanced AI systems to reduce risks and improve governance decisions.
If you could cause two other equally talented people to use their skills to tackle the world’s most pressing problems, that’d be double the impact you’d have if you did it yourself.
Help Chinese companies and stakeholders involved in building AI make the technology safe and good for society.
Allocate philanthropic funding as effectively as possible by identifying and vetting new organisations and projects.
One of the biggest bottlenecks for organisations working on pressing global problems is excellent operations staff to design, scale, and implement great systems.
Help identify the most pressing global problems and the most effective ways to solve them to enable others to have a greater impact.
Other high-impact career paths we’re excited about
Our top-ranked paths won’t be right for everybody, and there are lots of ways to have an impactful career. Here we list some additional paths we think can be high impact for the right person. These aren’t ranked in terms of impact, and there are surely many promising paths we haven’t written about at all.
Take a job that lets you contribute financially to funding-constrained, highly effective organisations. Two particularly strong options for this strategy are quantitative trading and founding a tech startup.
Most people can only do great work within a great organisation. Make it possible to deploy more talent and resources towards progress on pressing global problems.
Build a platform and spread important ideas about pressing global problems and how we can best solve them.
Help powerful institutions make good predictions and decisions, particularly around catastrophic risks.
Use coding skills to help shape the development of AI, prevent pandemics, and support the most impactful nonprofits.
You don’t have to be a technical or policy researcher to help AI labs work toward greater safety.
Multiply the impact of research by guiding, coordinating, and promoting the best work.
Help philanthropists invest resources now in order to deploy the returns in the medium- to long-term future, or whenever the time is right.
Do research in academia, which is home to some of the most far-reaching and cutting-edge research we can do.
Identify and implement the most effective solutions to climate change by focusing on the most extreme risks and neglected technologies.
The broader version of our top-recommended path on shaping China’s involvement in AI: help coordinate China and the West on a variety of global issues.
Some ways to build career capital
Most high-impact career paths, like those above, require years building up skills and experience — what we call career capital. See general advice on career capital, or check out the guides below on some specific ideas. The list is far from comprehensive.
Learn about policy making and government while having a direct social impact by helping improve government policies.
Learn about founding a startup while gaining connections and a broad skill set.
Roles in AI labs come with great potential for career growth in one of the world’s most sought-after fields — but in some cases there’s a risk of doing harm.
These degrees are highly valuable for those hoping to take on important roles in the US federal government.
Earn a valuable credential while developing your legal knowledge, analytical skills, and professional network.
Get a valuable credential in a field relevant to most of our priority paths (especially global priorities research), plus set yourself up for good earning-to-give options.
Understand the cutting edge of machine learning in order to contribute to the safe deployment of AI.
Build widely applicable and transferable skills in a fast-moving environment.
More career reviews
Below are many other career reviews we have written so far, listed alphabetically. Some of this content is a little out of date, so take the advice with a pinch of salt.
- Actuarial science
- Allied health professional
- Biomedical research
- Computer Science PhD
- Data collection for AI alignment
- Data science (for skill-building & earning to give)
- Executive search
- Founding effective nonprofits (international development)
- Front office finance (for skill-building & earning to give)
- Management consulting (for skill-building & earning to give)
- Marketing (for skill-building & earning to give)
- Medical careers
- Nursing
- Party politics in the UK
- Philosophy academia
- Programme manager in international organisations
- Pursuing fame in art and entertainment
- Teaching
- UK commercial law (for earning to give)
- Web designer
- Working at effective nonprofits (international development)
How to choose which career path you should pursue
The purpose of these lists is to give you more ideas about high-impact career paths. There are likely many other options worth considering for your personal list that we don’t cover.
As we cover in our career guide, the overall impact of your career depends on both:
- How impactful the path is in general
- Your degree of personal fit with it
Typically, once you have some good ideas for impact, we recommend narrowing down mainly based on fit — including whether the path is likely to be sustainable and personally satisfying.
If you want to do a more detailed comparison of a list of options, use our career decision process.
This is also just one step in making a full career plan – see the rest of our advice on career planning, including a career plan worksheet.
New to 80,000 Hours? Take a look at our career guide.
Our career guide is based on 10+ years of research alongside academics at Oxford. It aims to teach you how to find a fulfilling career that does good.
It’s full of practical tips and exercises. At the end, you’ll have a draft of your new career plan.
Enter your email and we’ll mail you a book (for free)
We believe you can help tackle some of the world’s biggest and most neglected problems, and our only aim is to help you do that.
Join our newsletter and we’ll send you a free copy of The Precipice — a book by philosopher Toby Ord about how to tackle the greatest threats facing humanity.