You have about 80,000 working hours in your career: 40 years x 50 weeks x 40 hours.<\/p>\n
If you want to have a positive impact with your life, your choice of career is probably your best opportunity to do that.<\/p>\n
That means it’s worth thinking hard about how to use this time most effectively. If you can make your career 1% higher impact (whatever that means to you), it would in theory be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how.<\/p>\n
We aim to help you work out how you can best use your 80,000 hours to help others, and to take action on that basis.<\/p>\n
We believe you can increase your impact by much more than 1%, and it’ll take a lot less than 800 hours.<\/p>\n
Learn more about why we think your choice of career is the biggest ethical decision you’ll ever make<\/a> and how we can help you have more impact<\/a>.<\/p>\n Table of Contents<\/p> 80,000 Hours provides research and support to help talented people move into careers that tackle the world’s most pressing problems.<\/p>\n We’re a nonprofit funded by philanthropic donations, and everything we provide is free.<\/p>\n What we offer:<\/p>\n Our podcast<\/a> \u2014 in-depth interviews about the world’s most pressing problems, and how you can help solve them<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Our job board<\/a> \u2014 with current opportunities to work on big and neglected problems and build skills<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Our one-on-one service<\/a> \u2014 providing individualised career advice for our more engaged readers, helping them make individual plans and important career connections, and matching some users to key high-impact roles.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n Right now, we focus most on helping people tackle issues that threaten the future of civilisation, such as pandemics, nuclear war, or AI, because we think tackling these issues is how our readers can most increase their impact.<\/p>\n 80,000 Hours started in 2011 when our founders, Ben<\/a> and Will<\/a>, were about to graduate from Oxford, and were wondering what to do with their own careers.<\/p>\n Like many, they wanted careers that were satisfying, paid the bills, and made a worthwhile contribution to society \u2014 but they were really unsure which paths would be best.<\/p>\n The standard advice seemed like it was to become a teacher, doctor, or charity worker, but these didn’t seem like a great fit for them. Should they instead go into research? Join a political campaign? Or something else?<\/p>\n It didn’t seem like existing career advice even tried to answer this question, so Ben and Will started doing their own research.<\/p>\n They presented their early ideas in a lecture in February 2011, and to their surprise, several people in the audience decided to totally change their career plans. And several asked them to start an organisation.<\/p>\n Inspired by this feedback, a team was formed and 80,000 Hours was started as a part-time project in 2011.<\/p>\n Our aim from the start has been to provide the advice we wish we’d had: in-depth, based on the best research available<\/a>, and taking seriously the question of how to do the most good.<\/p>\n Our thinking was that if we could enable just a couple of people to find high-impact careers, that would be like a multiplier on what we could achieve ourselves.<\/p>\n We hired a full-time team in 2012, and since then, we’ve spoken to hundreds of experts, read what relevant literature we could find, and conducted our own analyses of many career paths. Over 3,000 people have told us they’ve changed to higher-impact paths due to our advice.<\/p>\n We still have a lot to learn, and we’ve made some mistakes<\/a>, but we hope that by sharing what we’ve learned, we can help speed up our readers’ journeys toward high-impact careers, and by doing that, help tackle the world’s most pressing problems.<\/p>\n Read more about our progress each year in our annual reviews<\/a>. You can also hear Ben tell our founding story in this podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n As of 2024, we’ve had over 10 million readers on our website, have 400,000 subscribers to our newsletter, and have given one-on-one advice to over 5,000 people.<\/p>\n Over 3,000 people have told us that, due to engaging with us, they have significantly changed their career plans and expect to have a larger social impact as a result.<\/p>\n We’ve also been one of the largest drivers of growth in the effective altruism community<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some of our readers whose stories we’re especially proud of include:<\/p>\n<\/span>What do we do?<\/h2>\n
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<\/span>How did we get started?<\/h2>\n
<\/span>What impact has 80,000 Hours had so far?<\/h2>\n