Rob Wiblin

Hey listeners, Rob here, Head of Research at 80,000 Hours.

Today we have not a normal episode, but rather a recording of the 80,000 Hours Career Guide, which has just been updated for this year, 2023, and this week is getting a re-release on the website, and as a physical book, and also as this audiobook.

From 2016 through about 2019, this Career Guide was the core content on the website.

It was by far the most prominent thing that you would find if you went to 80,000hours.org.

Many of us helped contribute to it here and there, but it's first and foremost the brainchild of our founder and repeat guest on the show, Benjamin Todd.

The aim of the guide was to help people find a fulfilling career that does good.

And indeed, that's the subtitle of the guide, Find a Fulfilling Career That Does Good.

It was really quite popular and people regularly told us it was useful for helping them find a career that they thought was having substantially more impact.

But in 2019, we decided to deprioritize it in favor of what we called our Key Ideas series, but have now renamed the Advanced series.

That one kind of struck a more philosophical and rigorous tone and was preferred by some people.

It put theory and philosophy and long-termism more front and center than discussion of careers per se.

And that certainly had its advantages.

But, you know, looking over the user feedback, the problem that we saw was that for the typical reader, it seemed like the advanced series seemed on average worse.

I hope people find a more impactful career.

That probably is not going to be true for everyone.

You know, big fans of the show and longtime listeners, I think will often value the advanced series more.

But for the majority of people, it seemed like the old version just did a better job.

Noticing that, my colleagues thought, well, why not bring back the career guide?

So we've done that.

But in order to do it, it did need some editing to bring it up to date, given that much of it was written back in 2016.