80,000 Hours

3. Our podcast — in-depth interviews about the world’s most pressing problems and how you can help solve them 4. Our job board — which highlights current opportunities to build skills and work on pressing problems, and provides the opportunity to get matched with particularly promising roles 5. Our one-on-one service — which provides individualised career advice, helps people make plans and build connections, and matches some advisees to key high-impact roles We’re a nonprofit funded by philanthropic donations, and you can access all our advice for free. Our career guide was published by Penguin Random House in May 2026. You can buy the book here , or read the same material online . 80,000 Hours started in 2011 when our founders, Ben and Will , were about to graduate from Oxford and were wondering what to do with their own careers. Like many, they wanted careers that were satisfying, paid the bills, and made a worthwhile contribution to society — but they were really unsure which paths would be best. 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. 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. We’ll always have more to learn, and we’ve made some mistakes , 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. Read more about our progress each year in our annual reviews . You can also hear Ben tell our founding story in this podcast . As of early 2026, we’ve had over 10 million readers on our website, 1.8 million listening hours on our podcast, and have given one-on-one advice to over 7,500 people. 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. We’ve also been one of the largest drivers of growth in the effective altruism community . They include people working in top AI safety organisations and the White House, up-and-coming academics, founders of new nonprofits, and philanthropists. More formally, we evaluate our impact by tracking the number of people who significantly change their career plans because of us. You can read much more about how we evaluate our impact in our annual reviews . People sometimes point out that progress in AI could shorten the average career, perhaps by automating most jobs or even causing a global catastrophe . We share those concerns. However: Even if someone ‘only’ has 40,000 or 20,000 hours left to work, we want to help them use that time well. We believe that many careers will remain relevant well past the advent of transformative AI. Read more about why we focus on careers and the inspiration behind our name . So many people want to make a difference,1 but most career advice doesn’t even discuss the question of which career paths have the most impact. Our aim is to become the best source of advice and support for talented people who prioritise impact, helping them find satisfying careers that fulfil their potential to contribute to the world. Right now, we’re especially focused on helping people work on making advanced AI go well, because we think this is probably the best way to achieve our high-level, cause-impartial goal of helping people have high-impact careers . We’d also love to spark a global conversation about how people can best use their careers to help the world, and to inspire more people to take a high-impact path. We want the new default to be that everyone with the privilege to have options in their career asks themselves: “Wh