The 80000 Hours Career Guide — Find a fulfilling career that does good – Details, episodes & analysis

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.

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: 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.

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.

We sum up the whole guide in a few minutes.

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?

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.

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.