The 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023)
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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. Among other edits, Benjamin and the research team went over the references and footnotes to make them up to date and bring them in line with what we think the evidence currently shows about some of these topics.
We substantially changed our recommendations about career capital in particular. There were a whole lot of improvements to our advice on personal fit and career exploration. And the career planning article got fleshed out and there was a shiny new career planning template added to that. And of course, we've recorded this audiobook version, which has never existed before. The guide has 11 parts and it's reasonably long, but you can use the chapters feature in your podcasting app to skip to whatever part you'd like to listen to the most. We've also put together a separate podcast feed titled the 80,000 hours career guide, which you could go and subscribe to, which breaks it all down into individual pieces and also includes nine other appendices that have a lot of really useful information in them, but which we decided to leave out of this file in the interest of time and length.
The 11 chapters in the guide are 1. What makes for a dream job? 2. Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says. 3. Three ways anyone can make a difference, no matter their job. 4. Want to do good? Here's how to choose an area to focus on. Five, the world's biggest problems and why they're not what first comes to mind. Six, which jobs help people the most. Seven, which jobs put you in the best long-term position. Eight, how to find the right career for you. Nine, how to make your career plan. Ten, all the best advice we could find on how to get a job. And eleven, one of the most powerful ways to improve your career, join a community. And then to wrap it all together, there's a cheery final note where you get to imagine being on your deathbed.
We really like this update and hope that, like the previous version, it's going to continue to help people out for many years. And every so often they'll email us and tell us how the book changed their life in a really positive way, which is always super heartwarming to hear.
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