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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Help secure important organisations from attacks and prevent emerging technologies like AI and biotech from being misused, stolen, or tampered with.

Roles in AI companies come with great potential for career growth in one of the world’s most sought-after fields — but there’s a substantial risk of doing harm.

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.

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.

IMPORTANT: This Watts thermal expansion tank sizing tool should be used as a general guide to sizing thermal expansion tanks. Sizing calculations are wholly dependent on user input and are therefore only as accurate as the sizing criteria entered by the user. Use of this tool does not constitute a guarantee that the results obtained are suitable for any specific application.

Most of these paths are difficult to enter, and it’s common to start by investing years in building useful skills before pursuing them. But if any might be a good fit for you, we encourage you to seriously consider it.

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.

Help philanthropists invest resources now in order to deploy the returns in the medium- to long-term future, or whenever the time is right.

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.

Early on in your career, it might be more helpful to pick a broader skill set to learn instead of narrowing down to just one particular path.

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.

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.

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.

Help identify the most pressing global problems and the most effective ways to solve them to enable others to have a greater impact.

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.

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.

After that, you have to apply them. On this page, we provide reviews of over 20 specific career paths that put these skills to use tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

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. T&Cs here.

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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.

One of the biggest bottlenecks for organisations working on pressing global problems is excellent operations staff to design, scale, and implement great systems.

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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.

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.