The thing is, lots of jobs at charities just aren’t that impactful.

Some charities focus on programmes that don’t work, like Scared Straight, which actually caused kids to commit more crimes. Others focus on ways of helping that, while thoughtful and helpful, don’t have much leverage, like knitting individual sweaters for penguins affected by oil spills (this actually happened!) instead of funding large-scale ocean cleanup projects.

But there are also many organisations out there — both for-profit and nonprofit — focused on pressing problems, implementing effective and scalable solutions, run by great teams, and in need of people.

If you can build skills that are useful for helping an organisation like this, it could well be one of the highest-impact things you can do.

In particular, organisations often need generalists able to do the bread and butter of building an organisation — hiring people, management, administration, communications, running software systems, crafting strategy, fundraising, and so on.

We call these ‘organisation-building’ skills. They can be high impact because you can increase the scale and effectiveness of the organisation you’re working at, while also gaining skills that can be applied to a wide range of global problems in the future (and make you generally employable too).

Why are organisation-building skills valuable?

A well-run organisation can take tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people working on solving the world’s most pressing problems and help them work together far more effectively.

An employee with the right skills can often be a significant boost to an organisation, either by directly helping them deliver an impactful programme or by building the capacity of the organisation so that it can operate at a greater scale in the future. You could, for example, set up organisational infrastructure to enable the hiring of many more people in the future.

What’s more, organisation-building skills can be applied at most organisations, which means you’ll have opportunities to help tackle many different global problems in the future. You’ll also be flexibly able to work on many different solutions to any given problem if you find better solutions later in your career.

As an added bonus, the fact that pretty much all organisations need these skills means you’ll be employable if you decide to earn to give or step back from doing good all together. In fact, organisational management skills seem like some of the most useful and highest paid in the economy in general.

It can be even more valuable to help found a new organisation rather than build an existing one, though this is a particularly difficult step to take when you’re early in your career. (Read more on whether you should found an organisation early in your career.) See our profile on founding impactful organisations to learn more.

What does organisation-building typically involve?

A high-impact career using organisation-building skills typically involves these rough stages:

1. Building generally useful organisational skills, such as operations, people management, fundraising, administration, software systems, finance, etc.
2. Then applying those skills to help build (or found) high-impact organisations

The day-to-day of an organisation-building role is going to vary a lot depending on the job.

Here’s a possible description that could help build some intuition.

Picture yourself working from an office or, increasingly, from your own home. You’ll spend lots of time on your computer — you might be planning, organising tasks, updating project timelines, reworking a legal brief, or contracting out some marketing. You’ll likely spend some time communicating via email or chatting with colleagues. Your day will probably involve a lot of problem solving, making decisions to keep things going.

If you work for a small organisation, especially in the early stages, your “office” could be anywhere — a home office, a local coffee shop, or a shared workspace. If you manage people, you’ll conduct one-on-one meetings to provide feedback, set goals, and discuss personal development. In a project-oriented role, you might spend lots of time developing strategy, or analysing data to evaluate your impact.

What skills are needed to build organisations?

Organisation builders typically have skills in areas like:

• Operations management
• Project management (including setting objectives, metrics, etc.)
• People management and coaching (Some manager jobs require specialised skills, but some just require general management-associated skills like leadership, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution.)
• Executive leadership (setting and achieving organisation-wide goals, making top-level decisions about budgeting, etc.)
• Entrepreneurship
• Recruiting
• Fundraising
• Marketing (which also benefits from communications skills)
• Communications and public relations (which also benefits from communications skills)
• Human resources
• Office management
• Events management
• Assistant and administrative work
• Finance and accounting
• Corporate and nonprofit law

Many organisations have a significant need for generalists who span several of these areas. If your aim is to take a leadership position, it’s useful to have a shallow knowledge of several.

You can also pick just one skill to specialise in — especially for areas like law and accounting that tend to be their own track.

Generally, larger organisations have a greater need for specialists, while those with under 50 employees hire more generalists.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

There’s no need to focus on the specific job or sector you work in now — it’s possible to enter organisation-building from a very wide variety of areas. We’ve even known academic philosophers who have transitioned to organisation-building!

Some common initial indicators of fit might include:

• You have an optimisation mindset. You frequently notice how things could be done more efficiently and have a strong internal drive to prevent avoidable errors and make things run more smoothly.
• You intuitively engage in systems thinking and enjoy going meta. This is a bit difficult to summarise, but involves things like: you’d notice when people ask you similar questions multiple times and then think about how to prevent the issue from coming up again. For example: “Can you give me access to this doc” turns into “What went wrong such that this person didn’t already have access to everything they need? How can we improve naming conventions or sharing conventions in the future?”
• You’re reliable, self-directed, able to manage your time well, and you can create efficient and productive plans and keep track of complex projects.
• You might also be good at learning quickly and have high attention to detail.

Of course, different types of organisation-building will require different skills. For example, being a COO or events manager requires greater social and system building skills, whereas working in finance requires fewer social skills, but does require basic quantitative skills and perhaps more conscientiousness and attention to detail.

If you’re really excited by a particular novel idea and have lots of energy and excitement for the idea, you might be a good fit for founding an organisation. (Read more about what it takes to successfully found a new organisation.)

You should try doing some cheap tests first — these might include talking to someone who works at the organisation you’re interested in helping to build, volunteering to do a short project, or doing an internship. Then you might commit to working there for 2–24 months (being prepared to switch to something else if you don’t think you’re on track).

How to tell if you’re on track

All of these — individually or together — seem like good signs of being on track to build really useful organisation-building skills:

• You get job offers (as a contractor or staff) at organisations you’d like to work for.
• You’re promoted within your first two years.
• You receive excellent performance reviews.
• You’re asked to take on progressively more responsibility over time.
• Your manager / colleagues suggest you might take on more senior roles in the future.
• You ask your superiors for their honest assessment of your fit and they are positive (e.g. they tell you you’re in the top 10% of people they can imagine doing your role).
• You’re able to multiply a superior’s time by over 2–20X, depending on the role type.
• If you’re aiming to build a new organisation, write out some one-page summaries of ideas for new organisations you’d like to exist and get feedback from grantmakers and experts.
• If founding a new organisation, you get seed funding from a major grantmaker, like Open Philanthropy, Longview Philanthropy, EA Funds, or a private donor.

This said, if you don’t hit these milestones, you might still be a good fit for organisation-building — the issue might be that you’re at the wrong organisation or have the wrong boss.

How to get started building organisation-building skills

You can get started by finding any role that will let you start learning one of the skills listed above. Work in one specialisation will often give you exposure to the others, and it’s often possible to move between them.

If you can do this at a high-performing organisation that’s also having a big impact right away, that’s great. If you’re aware of any organisations like these, it’s worth applying just in case.

But, unfortunately, this is often not possible, especially if you’re fresh out of college, for a number of reasons:

• The organisations have limited mentorship capacity, so they most often hire people with a couple of years of experience rather than those fresh out of college (though there are exceptions) and often aren’t in a good position to help you become excellent at these skills.
• These organisations usually hire people who already have some expertise in the problem area they’re working on (e.g. AI safety, biosecurity), as these issues involve specialised knowledge.
• We chose our recommended problems in large part because they’re unusually neglected. But the fact that they’re neglected also means there aren’t many open positions or training programmes.

As a result, early in your career it can easily be worth pursuing roles at organisations that don’t have much impact in order to build your skills.

The way to do this is to work at any organisation that’s generally high-performing, especially if you can work under someone who’s a good manager and will mentor you — the best way to learn how to run an organisation is to learn from people who are already excellent at this skill.

Then, try to advance as quickly as you can within that organisation or move to higher-responsibility roles in other organisations after 1–3 years of high-performance.

It can also help if the organisation is small but rapidly growing, since that usually makes it much easier to get promoted — and if the organisation succeeds in a big way, that will give you a lot of options in the future.

In a small organisation you can also try out a wider range of roles, helping you figure out which aspects of organisation-building are the best fit for you and giving you the broad background that’s useful for leadership roles in the future. Moreover, many of the organisations we think are doing the best work on the most pressing problems are startups, so being used to this kind of environment can be an advantage.

One option within this category we especially recommend is to consider becoming an early employee at a tech startup.

If you pick well, working at a tech startup gives you many of the advantages of working at a small, growing, high-performing organisation mentioned above, while also offering high salaries and an introduction to the technology sector. (This is even better if you can find an organisation that will let you learn about artificial intelligence or synthetic biology.)

We’ve advised many people who have developed organisation-building skills in startups and then switched to nonprofit work (or earned to give), while having good backup options.

That said, smaller organisations have downsides such as being more likely to fail and less mentorship capacity. Many are also poorly run. So it’s important to pick carefully.

Another option to consider in this category is working at a leading AI lab, because they can often offer good training, look impressive on your CV, and let you learn about AI. That said, you’ll need to think carefully about whether your work could be accelerating the risks from AI as well.

One of the most common ways to build these skills is to work in large tech companies, consulting or professional services (or more indirectly, to train as a lawyer or in finance). These are most useful for learning how to apply these skills in very large corporate and government organisations, or to build a speciality like accounting. We think there are often more direct ways to do useful work on the problems we think are most pressing, but these prestigious corporate jobs can still be the best option for some.

However, it’s important to remember you can build organisation-building skills in any kind of organisation: from nonprofits to academic research institutes to government agencies to giant corporations. What most matters is that you’re working with people who have this skill, who are able to train you.

Should you found your own organisation early in your career?

For a few people, founding an organisation fairly early in your career could be a fantastic career step. Whether or not the organisation you start succeeds, along the way you could gain strong organisation-building (and other) skills and a lot of career capital.

We think you should be ambitious when deciding career steps, and it often makes sense to pursue high-upside options first when you’re doing some career exploration.

This is particularly true if you:

• Have an idea that you’ve seriously thought about, stress tested, and got positive feedback on from relevant experts
• Have real energy and excitement for your idea (not for the idea of being an entrepreneur)
• Understand that you’re likely to fail, and have good backup plans in place for that

It can be hard to figure out if your idea is any good, or if you’ll be any good at this, in advance. One rule of thumb is that if, after six months to a year of work, you can be accepted to a top incubator (like Y Combinator), you’re probably on track. But if you can’t get into a top incubator, you should consider trying to build organisation-building skills in a different way (or try building a completely different skill set).

There are many downsides of working on your own projects. In particular, you’ll get less direct feedback and mentorship, and your efforts will be spread thinly across many different types of tasks and skills, making it harder to develop specialist expertise.
To learn more, see our article on founding new projects tackling top problems.

Find jobs that use organisation-building skills

See our curated list of job opportunities for this path, which you can filter by ‘management’ and ‘operations’ to find opportunities in this category (though there will also be jobs outside those filters where you can apply organisation-building skills).

View all opportunities

Once you have these skills, how can you best apply them to have an impact?

The problem you work on is probably the biggest driver of your impact, so the first step is to decide which problems you think are most pressing.

Once you’ve done that, the next step is to identify the highest-potential organisations working on your top problems.

In particular, look for organisations that:

1. Implement an effective solution, or one that has a good chance of having a big impact (even if it might not work)
2. Have the potential to grow
3. Are run by a great team
4. Are in need of your skills

These organisations will most often be nonprofits, but they could also be research institutes, political organisations, or for-profit companies with a social mission.¹

For specific ideas, see our list of recommended organisations. You can also find longer lists of suggestions within each of our problem profiles.

Finally, see if you can get a job at one of these organisations that effectively uses your specific skills. If you can’t, that’s also fine — you can apply your skills elsewhere, for example through earning to give, and be ready to switch into working for a high-impact organisation in the future.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use organisation-building skills

These are some reviews of career paths we’ve written that use ‘organisation-building’ skills:

• Operations management
• Helping build the effective altruism community
• Non-technical roles in leading AI labs
• Earning to give
• Founding new projects tackling top problems
• Become an executive assistant for someone doing especially high-impact work
• Working at effective nonprofits
• Research management

Read next:  Explore other useful skills

Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

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The post Organisation-building appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Summary

Going to law school in the United States may help you pursue careers in policy that can address some of the world’s most pressing problems. Being a practicing lawyer can also potentially have a high impact. The educational experience itself can offer meaningful career benefits.

However, there are substantial downsides to law school, and it may be a poor fit depending on your personal circumstances. It’s worth fully exploring what aims law school would help you accomplish, whether there are more promising alternatives, and whether you would find pursuing a career in law or policy fulfilling.

This article outlines considerations for readers deciding whether to get a US law degree, explains how it might help them have a positive impact, and describes the law school experience. It is based on public resources about law school and careers in law and policy, as well as the experiences of people who have recently attended or considered attending law school. Consider this post a series of “best guesses” about how to approach the decision about whether to attend law school, rather than a definitive guide or empirical study.

I. Why law school could be an important step in a promising career path

The most common jobs for lawyers are probably not the most promising from the perspective of doing as much good as you can. A large share of US lawyers, especially graduates of top-ranked law schools, work in large private law firms, organising corporate transactions or defending large companies from lawsuits.¹

But law school can be a promising route into high-impact careers in policy and government, especially for people interested in eventually holding senior roles for which formal credentials are highly valued.

Since we believe working in policy to address some of the most pressing problems in the world is among the most promising career paths for people who want to have a high positive impact, law school may be a particularly appealing place to start, especially for people who are early in their career. Policy work in the US is a particularly high-priority path, because the US federal government has an outsized impact on some of the most important cause areas.

(Readers should note, though, that a law degree is not necessarily required for these positions, and it can be a costly credential to obtain.)

Getting a legal education is also a necessary step to practicing law, which includes some roles we haven’t researched much but which might be high-impact, such as becoming a litigator (a lawyer who works on cases that go to court) focused on animal welfare or biosecurity, or designing contracts and governance structures in high-stakes settings.

If you do decide to go to law school, it is valuable to go in with a clear plan about how you will use your legal education to achieve a positive impact on the world. Plan especially to take advantage of opportunities to develop concrete skills, connect with relevant networks, and be on the lookout for opportunities to achieve positive impact that others with different training and backgrounds might have missed.

This section outlines some paths for using a law degree that stand out as especially promising. Readers might also be interested in advice that Cullen O’Keefe, who works on AI governance at OpenAI, shared on these topics during an AMA in 2020.

Roles influencing policy

Some high-impact policy roles for which a law degree can help a great deal include:

• Working in the executive branch in a policymaking role may be among the most promising opportunities for people with law degrees to help others. There is a vast variety of potential promising roles in this area, many of which may preferentially hire people with law degrees.
• Congressional staffing is another especially promising option, profiled here and discussed at length in this guide to working in Congress. One survey from 2017 found that about 16 percent of congressional staffers working in Washington, DC (excluding interns and fellows) have law degrees (JDs); for comparison, about 30 percent hold a master’s degree in some field. As two examples (among many) of high-profile leaders with law degrees who have followed this path:
  • Ron Klain, White House Chief of Staff, started his career as a legislative director and later served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
  • Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense (among many other roles), worked as a legislative assistant early in his career.
    Readers should also consider the following potential paths for which a law degree seems to be helpful, with examples of prominent people with law degrees who have pursued each one:
• Elected public office (e.g. three of the last five Presidents of the United States: Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton; a majority of US Senators and more than a third of US Representatives; 16 of out 50 US governors)

• Appointed roles in policy making (e.g. looking only at the current US Cabinet: Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior; Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture; Gina Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce; Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services; Marcia Fudge, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; Jennifer Granholm, Secretary of Energy; Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security)

• Diplomacy (e.g. four of the last five Secretaries of State: Antony Blinken, Mike Pompeo, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton)

• Roles in global or regional governance bodies such as the United Nations or the European Union (e.g. David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Programme at the United Nations)

• Journalism (e.g. Matt Levine, columnist for Bloomberg News; Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter at The New York Times)

• Grantmaking (e.g. John Palfrey, President of the MacArthur Foundation)

• Business (e.g. Richard Anderson, former CEO of Delta Airlines and Amtrak; Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs)

• Research focused on questions related to effective altruism priority cause areas (e.g. Cass Sunstein, a leading scholar on the use of cost-benefit analysis in law and policy)

Working at a law-focused think tank such as the Center for Democracy and Technology or Public Knowledge could be a promising step for people with law degrees interested in working at the intersection of policy making and research. See this guide to working at a think tank for additional background about working in think tanks in Washington, DC. In some think tanks, having some type of “terminal” advanced degree, such as a JD or PhD, can be an advantage over having a master’s degree.

Some law school graduates also enter legal academia as professors, researchers, or law school clinical instructors.² A law degree generally is required for these roles. In addition to helping prepare and shape the paths of future generations of lawyers and policymakers, people working in these roles can explore and substantiate legal theories and policy options in important areas, such as governance of emerging technology such as AI. Academics might propose new regulatory structures, articulate legal justifications for important agency powers, or propose important legal limits on government or private action.

Finally, some lawyers work on defining social movements, often in part through litigation, but also using tools outside legal practice like grassroots advocacy and media strategy. This path emphasises the indirect benefits of raising an issue to the public consciousness or conceptualising a harm that might otherwise go ignored.

Roles practicing law

The overwhelming majority of law school graduates practice law.³ Anecdotally, many people who enter law school planning to pursue other paths — including roles in policy — end up practicing law instead.

In certain roles, individual practicing lawyers can have significant leverage to help others by shaping public policy or private incentives. Promising paths include:

• Litigation, either on behalf of a government enforcement agency or private plaintiffs. For example:
  • Lawyers at Richman Law & Policy and Legal Impact for Chickens bring civil lawsuits to deter private actors from engaging in activities that harm vast numbers of animals.
  • Lawyers at the Legal Priorities Project are exploring using civil lawsuits to reduce catastrophic biorisk.
  • Lawyers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau write regulations and can bring civil lawsuits aimed at increasing transparency in the use of AI models in consumer lending.
• Negotiating and verifying compliance with international treaties. For example:
  • Lawyers in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance at the Department of State work with counterparts in other countries to design, verify, and enforce multilateral agreements to manage access to nuclear, biological, cyber, and conventional weapons.
• Providing regulatory advice in government roles that require bar admission. For example, attorney-advisors help implement important laws and regulations in offices like:
  • The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response in the US Department of Health and Human Services, which develops biomedical countermeasures.
  • The Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Department of the Treasury, which is responsible for sanctions policy.
• Providing legal counsel about important strategic decisions, either as an employee of an important or highly impactful organisation or an external advisor to people in high-leverage roles. For example:
  • In-house counsel at firms like DeepMind provide important legal compliance advice; senior people in these roles often also participate in strategic decision-making and may be responsible for representing “Policy” or “Governance” teams in meetings of “C-suite” top leaders.
  • In-house counsel at organisations and funders working on priority problems can help organisations start up and scale effectively, while avoiding potential legal problems that could significantly reduce their impact.
• Advising clients about how to write contracts and structure business deals in high-stakes settings where omitting an edge case or misaligning incentives would be especially costly. For example:
  • Lawyers and researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute developed a framework for a Windfall Clause through which developers of potentially transformative AI systems commit to sharing eventual profits of such a system with others.
    More broadly, practicing law can be an entry point into working in the US federal government in an area relevant to a top problem, which may be an especially valuable way of building career capital or having direct positive impact. According to FedScope data, there were nearly 42,000 practicing lawyers working in the federal government as of September 2021.

II. Advantages of going to law school

Law school equips students with knowledge about details of the US legal system that may be helpful in a variety of law- and policy-related careers.

But since a law degree isn’t always necessary to have an impact on important policy issues, readers should weigh the significant pros and cons of going to law school for their goals.

We’ll start by looking at the advantages law school brings.

Law school gives you structural knowledge about law and public policy

One of the fundamental things taught in law school is the process of answering a legal question: the components of an answer, where to find them, and how to piece them together to understand what is certain and what is ambiguous.

Even more importantly, legal training also gives people a sense of obstacles that are likely to arise when implementing or enforcing a policy. For example, when might a court get in the way? When might the policy not be interpreted as you expect? When might it fall outside the authority of the entity enacting the policy?

Answering these kinds of questions is critical to using a career in policy to have a positive impact.

Law school imparts domain-specific knowledge about particular areas of law

Law school courses also provide instruction in the content of law in several foundational areas. For example, the standard first-year curriculum at most law schools equips students well to answer questions like:

• What procedural steps are required to file a successful lawsuit in federal court?
  • Example application: What documents must be filed, and by when, to force factory farms to turn over evidence of routine animal abuse? (See, e.g. recent lawsuits regarding misleading labelling of animal products)
• What are the default rules used to decide who owns a piece of property?
  • Example application: What rules would courts use to resolve conflicts about who owns resources in outer space?
• Under the US Constitution, what kinds of laws does only Congress have the power to enact, and what kinds of laws can also be enacted by states?
  • Example application: What kinds of new safety restrictions for bioengineering labs can be enacted at the state level, without requiring an act of Congress?

In second- and third-year courses, students can build relevant knowledge about a wider variety of topics, including specific subject-matter areas (e.g. national security law, animal law).

As with the first-year curriculum, knowledge about these topics could have direct applications to important cause areas, helping graduates make a positive difference through legal or policy action. For example:

• A course in First Amendment constitutional law can help equip students to answer questions like, “How, if at all, can the federal government restrict publication of potentially harmful scientific information without violating the constitutional right to ‘freedom of speech’?”
• A course in administrative law can help equip students to answer questions like, “What is the extent of a federal agency’s power to regulate in a new area? When might a court step in to stop an agency action?”

It is possible to learn enough about the relevant laws to perform research on these topics without attending law school. However, law school can help a person become a much more effective legal researcher.

Moreover, giving professional legal advice to others about the answers to legal questions generally requires completing law school and becoming a member of the bar in the jurisdiction where you work.⁴ Developing this professional skill set could be high-impact if you end up working for or advising effective organisations addressing important problems.

What skills and aptitudes does law school help you develop?

Law school can help students build ‘aptitudes’ that will help them tackle pressing problems, including analytical reasoning, distillation, pragmatic thinking, and written and oral communication.

However, law school may not be the optimal way to build these skills — so it may make sense to think of them primarily as “fringe benefits.” If your goal is to optimise for one or more of these aptitudes, rather than to build several of them peripherally while working toward a valuable credential, you can probably do that more directly (and cheaply) or while working full-time on a pressing problem.

Having a law degree opens up opportunities

Beyond providing you with a valuable education, law school also provides graduates with a sought-after credential that can serve as valuable career capital.

This career capital can take many forms:

• Some roles are only available to people with law degrees (e.g. litigator, attorney-advisor, general counsel).
• Some highly competitive roles preferentially hire people with law degrees, even if they do not explicitly require a JD
• In some roles, people with law degrees may be taken more seriously by their colleagues or counterparts.
• People with law degrees may be more likely to be promoted later in their careers to influential positions.

Law school can give you access to valuable professional networks. Over the course of three years studying together and living in close proximity to one another, most law students form close relationships with many of their peers. Some students also form close relationships with professors, especially by working with them as research assistants. Many people also form connections with practicing lawyers and other experienced graduates of their law school through alumni networks.

Networking opportunities often continue well after graduation from law school. Lawyers have many opportunities to meet other people, especially other lawyers, including co-workers, co-counsel, opposing counsel, and judges hearing a client’s case — some of whom may end up in positions of significant social influence. Networks within relatively small legal practice areas (for example, environmental or animal law) can be especially tight.

Law school can also provide access to people you wouldn’t otherwise meet. In some cases, a law school affiliation may make some people in high-leverage positions more likely to respond to thoughtful outreach.

And for many students, law school provides a unique opportunity to quickly access many different work environments, test your fit, network with potential employers, and work on interesting projects or with certain actors (e.g. the US Department of Justice) that would otherwise be very difficult to access.

Law school might be a more attractive option for you if…

• You already have a strong interest in careers where a JD is necessary, such as becoming a litigator, or would provide a distinct advantage, such as working on regulatory policy in government.
• You already have academic credentials that make you a good candidate for admission to a competitive law school, such as a high undergraduate GPA and/or an especially high score on the LSAT or GRE. (See admissions “predictor” calculators here and here).
• You have access to significant financial resources, such as family support or scholarship funds, that you can use to pay law school tuition but not to provide direct benefits to others or make other valuable investments. (But note that, especially with support from a loan repayment assistance plan, having these resources is not at all necessary to attending law school and having a positive impact afterward.)
• You have a strong comparative advantage in verbal reasoning and writing, such that you think your best opportunities to make a positive difference through your career are very likely to make active use of those skills rather than quantitative reasoning or other strengths.
• You know you do not want to further pursue your current career path or are not on any career path. Law school is a career “reset” button in that professional accomplishments prior to law school, unless truly exceptional or highly specialised, do not have a strong effect on what quality or types of legal jobs you can be considered for. Prior resume gaps or experiences you would prefer not to highlight will carry less weight after you graduate law school, and no one is expected to have any prior acquaintance with legal work or subject matter when they start law school. (Though we also think many people are too quick to use law school as an attempt to “reset” their careers instead of pursuing potentially superior options, as is discussed below.)
• You would prefer to shift focus away from your undergraduate degree on your CV, either because your grades weren’t as strong as you would have liked or because you attended a college whose networks or employment outcomes aren’t as strong as those of a law school you could attend.

III. Reasons you might not want to go to law school

One potential downside of attending law school is that the experience has the potential to push students toward decisions that they would not, prior to law school, have considered optimal, or that cause them harm in other ways.

Law school is often extraordinarily expensive

The need to make payments on large student loans may push some law students toward high-paying roles in corporate law that are unlikely to be among the best opportunities to help others, even considering their potential for earning to give.

Tuition for some top law schools can be as much as $70,000 a year. There are additional details about the costs of law school below.

There may be physical and mental health costs

Law school can do harm to people’s physical and mental health. It is relatively common to experience severe burnout at some point during or after spending three years in such a high-stakes, competitive environment.

Not only is this a terrible experience in itself, but people who experience that kind of burnout may be less likely to take on a demanding role that they might have found attractive before starting law school. And the stress and toll on mental health associated with law school may hinder their overall productivity in addressing pressing problems.

Readers can check out our advice on how to have a successful career while taking care of their mental and physical health.

Law school may change your values in negative ways

Another potential downside of attending law school is that law students are often surrounded by peers who are optimising for landing jobs practicing corporate law at large firms (often because they view these roles as necessary or inevitable), rather than for helping others. Even for more altruistically minded law students, it’s relatively rare to focus on larger-scale issues like animal welfare or governing transformative technologies.

Being surrounded by peer groups with such different goals may make it more challenging for effective-altruism-minded students to keep up the motivation to pursue a less-trodden path, such as taking a policymaking role focusing on AI safety.

Readers considering law school may want to speak with someone who has been to law school to get a better sense of how these pressures manifest in practice. Some people have also written perspectives on this phenomenon that may be helpful: this essay, which was written by a law student in 1998 but still resonates with students today, provides one perspective on potential personal costs of spending time in an institution optimising for goals other than your own. This qualitative study explores the pressures toward corporate law that many top law students report experiencing; it includes several excerpts of interviews with law students.

Should you get a law degree to earn to give?

We think readers considering law school with an eye toward making a high salary in order to donate part of it to effective organisations – earning to give – may benefit from considering other options.⁵

While it is possible to earn a high income by working as a lawyer (e.g. as a partner in a law firm serving large corporate clients or as a general counsel to a large public company, both of which can lead to seven-figure compensation; or as a plaintiff-side class action litigator, which can lead to 10-30% contingency fees on nine-figure court judgments and settlements), the paths to the highest-earning legal roles are highly selective, demanding, and uncertain.

You might have options for earning to give that have higher expected value. For example, strong candidates for admission to top law schools who also have above-average quantitative skills would likely also be competitive for roles in finance or management consulting that can eventually lead to high incomes without incurring the opportunity cost and direct expense of spending three years in law school. Similarly, the expected value of becoming a for-profit entrepreneur may be higher than the expected value of high-earning legal careers for many candidates, and it is not clear that law school would improve most people’s chances of success on an entrepreneurial career path.

Law school might be a less attractive option for you if…

• It seems unclear whether a JD would help you on the path to having the kind of positive impact you hope to have on the world, and you can think of more promising uses of the three years you would spend in law school.
• You don’t currently have a clear plan for what you would like to do after law school and why that option is valuable compared to alternatives that are available to you without a law degree.
• You already have elite credentials, such that the additional value of a law degree as a signal of intelligence and conscientiousness would be less useful.
• You already have a strong personal fit for a high-impact role working on a pressing problem, such that the opportunity cost of the three years you would spend in law school is unusually high.
• You have significant personal commitments, such as family obligations, that make spending 50+ hours per week on schoolwork (as well as taking on significant debt) an unusually costly investment.
• You find prolonged periods of stress, such as a multi-week exam period, or negative feedback, such as a disappointing response from a professor to an answer to a cold-call question you gave in front of several dozen classmates, to be especially costly or discouraging for mental health or other reasons.

IV. What alternatives to law school should you consider?

Most people who have a good shot at admission to a top US law school also have lots of other promising opportunities to have a significant positive impact on the world.

Options that would allow you to test fit for potential paths after law school

Each of these options could be a 2-3 year venture before law school or could help you launch a career that doesn’t include law school at all:

• Working as a congressional staffer
• Working at a policy think tank
• Founding or co-founding a new organisation to tackle an important project

If you feel relatively confident that law school is the right path for you, and you are interested in practicing law after graduation, you could also consider working for 1-2 years as a paralegal or legal assistant at a law firm or legal aid organisation. These options involve significant tradeoffs, but they could give you a better idea of lawyers’ day-to-day responsibilities and your potential fit for working as a practicing attorney.

Education options that may be attractive alternatives to law school

If you are considering law school primarily as a route to policy careers, you should give serious consideration to master’s degree programmes in subjects directly relevant to policy work, such as MPPs.

Most master’s programmes last two years, compared to three years for law school, and provide students significantly more flexibility in course selection. On the other hand, a law degree might be a somewhat more valuable credential for certain roles.

People with the relevant background should perhaps also compare the costs and benefits of law school to those of a PhD programme in a promising field, such as economics or computer science. Among other differences, law school is shorter but more expensive than most PhD programmes — at least if the PhD is fully funded by the university, which is very common for top programmes.

V. What is law school actually like?

Law school in the US is a graduate professional degree programme. Most US law students enrol in Juris Doctor (JD) programmes, which are typically three-year, full-time programmes.

The sections below will provide detailed descriptions of key facets of law school, which should help you assess whether choosing this path would be a good fit for you.

VI. Cheap tests to assess your fit for law school

There are several low-cost ways to help figure out if you’re likely to fare well in law school:

1. Speak with a current law student or recent law graduate about their experience.

2. Try attending a class at a nearby law school. Many (but not all) law professors will allow prospective students to sit in on one of their classes, if asked politely in advance. Consider writing an email to a professor at a university where you are studying or are a recent graduate, or near where you are currently working.

3. Try watching a video of a mock law school class.

4. Read a book about the law school experience. One contributor recommends 1L of a Ride, which describes itself as providing “a candid, comprehensive roadmap to both academic and emotional success in law school’s crucial first year.”

5. Try reading an edited version of an opinion written by an appellate court. You could try reading an edited version of the US Supreme Court’s opinion in Erie Railroad v. Tompkins, or McBoyle v. United States. Note that it’s normal for this to be a slow, challenging process at first — most people need more time to read legal opinions than to read other kinds of writing of similar length, especially when starting law school.

You should also consider assessing your ability to earn admission to top law schools by taking a practice test for the LSAT, which you can do for free using the Khan Academy platform or LSAT Demon.

You should not rule out attending law school based on a bad first experience with the LSAT — most people can dramatically improve their performance on the test through study and practice. But finding that these question types come naturally would be good evidence you have some of the verbal reasoning skills that help people succeed in law school.

VII. Getting into law school

An applicant’s particular undergraduate field of study does not tend to matter very much in predicting law school admissions outcomes; however, undergraduate grades are an important factor. Opinions vary (including among contributors to this post) about whether undergraduates aiming to attend top law schools should consider “easier” majors with more generous grading curves. For more information, see this guide with advice on law school admissions.

Unlike with some other graduate programs, if you have exceptional grades and test scores, you have very strong odds of admission to a top law school, even if other aspects of your application are less strong. Admissions “predictor” calculators (for example, here and here) can give you a sense for the odds of admission to top schools with a given LSAT score and undergraduate GPA.

It is common for students to work full-time for one or more years between finishing a bachelor’s degree and starting law school. For example, in the most recently admitted class at Harvard Law School, 82% of students were at least one year out of college and 63% were two or more years out of college. Most students work somewhere between two and four years before starting law school. (While it is possible to enter law school after a longer period of working, and every year many people do so, applicants with longer work histories may face a bit more scepticism from law school admissions committees; admissions officers may expect to see a particularly compelling explanation of why such applicants are now pivoting toward law.)

Finally, law school candidates must take an admissions test. Historically, American Bar Association (ABA) rules have required candidates to take the LSAT and law schools have used LSAT scores as an important factor in making admissions decisions. Following a policy change by the ABA in 2021, an increasing number of law schools now accept the GRE in lieu of the LSAT. It is possible that future applicants may not have to take either test: in spring 2022, an ABA committee recommended dropping the test requirement. However, at least historically, law school admissions outcomes have been driven in significant part by undergraduate GPAs and LSAT scores, alongside factors like candidates’ personal backgrounds and any extraordinary accomplishments they may have had prior to law school.

VIII. Advice to keep in mind if you are leaning toward pursuing law school

IX. Which law schools should you consider?

Within the legal profession, Yale, Stanford, and Harvard have historically been regarded as the “top three” US law schools. (Recently, the University of Chicago has risen in law school rankings, in part because of its excellent employment outcomes; it leads Harvard, which is tied for fourth with Columbia, in the most recent US News and World Report rankings.) Graduates of these schools are well-represented in influential government offices, elite private law firms, and top roles within selective nonprofits. Before Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2020, the last person to be appointed to the Supreme Court without having attended Yale, Stanford, or Harvard was Justice John Paul Stevens, in 1975.⁶

However, many other law schools train students well and place graduates in influential positions. The US News and World Report maintains a ranking of law schools; placement in this list tends to be correlated with graduates’ employment outcomes and the strength of the school’s network, especially in its local market. For those interested in paths in the Washington, DC area (including many US federal policy careers), the law schools at Georgetown, George Washington University, and perhaps George Mason University (particularly for readers interested in building networks among conservative policymakers) may be worth considering. As of 2019, Georgetown was the second-most common law school alma mater of Members of Congress (14 alumni), after Harvard (23 alumni).⁷

A note of caution regarding mid- and lower-ranked schools

Multiple contributors to this post warned that prospective applicants should think carefully before accepting a seat at a law school outside the top 14 places in the US News and World Report rankings (referred to in law circles as the “T14”), where tuition is similar to that at top schools but career outcomes may be very different.

The demand for especially high-impact legal jobs in federal government, litigation, or advocacy significantly exceeds supply, so employers often resort to filtering candidates using naive proxies, including which law school a person attended. The focus on where people earned their degrees is stronger in the legal profession than in some other fields, so attending a mid-ranked law school may have very different career consequences from, for example, attending a mid-ranked college (which is an excellent choice for many people). There may be an exception to this rule for those who can easily chart their own career paths (e.g. opening up their own impact litigation nonprofit), but the personal risks of that path are high, and even there, getting a top-ranked degree can help.

But note that law school rank will also matter less when your goal is to get non-legal jobs where your hiring managers are not themselves lawyers, as is true for certain congressional or think tank positions.

This guide to the law school provides additional details about schools to consider and data that applicants can use to inform their decision-making in the admissions process.

X. Special programme types

This article is adapted from a separate law school guide. Reproduction of this content by external publishers is allowed under the relevant copyright policy. Adaptation of the article does not imply endorsement by the original authors.

Learn more

• Admissions and financial advice for US law school applicants
• An Overview of Part-Time Law Programs
• Our congressional staffer career profile
• Advice on US policy careers
• Working at a DC think tank: why and how
• Our guide to working in AI strategy and policy
• Our key article on important government and policy work
• Check out the work of the Legal Priorities Project

You can also review recent postings on our job board, which may give you a sense of potential high-impact career opportunities you’re interested in and what their requirements are.

And, as noted above, if you are interested in getting in touch with members of the effective altruism community who have attended, currently attend, or are considering law school, we encourage you to fill out this short survey.

The post Should you go to law school in the US to have a high-impact career? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Law is also one of the highest paying professions, however, so working directly on social justice issues isn’t the only way you can do good as a lawyer. If you enjoy commercial work and can secure a place at a high-paying firm, you can also have an impact by donating some of your earnings to charity. We call this earning to give.

If you target your donations to highly effective charities, this could be just as high-impact as public interest law. Newly qualified lawyers at top-ranked firms can expect to earn upwards of £70,000. Donating 10% of this take-home pay⁵ would be enough to save somebody’s life by buying anti-malaria bednets.⁶ If you are one of the approximately 5% who makes partner, you could earn over £1m each year – enough to fund a whole team of researchers, advocates or non-profit entrepreneurs.

In this profile, we explore the pros and cons of law for earning to give. We focus on high-end commercial law – where the money is – and hope to discuss public interest law in a separate review. It’s based on the legal training and experience of the primary author of this profile, Natalie Cargill, as well as conversations with lawyers from a range of practice areas. We’ve also drawn on academic literature, surveys by the Law Society, and publicly-available salary data.

The post Yes, a career in commercial law has earning potential. We still don’t recommend it. appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

The short answer to this question is ‘very low’. In total there are 535 seats in Congress and 320 million people living in the USA. At any point then, just 1 in 600,000 people living in the USA are members of Congress.

In a competition this insanely selective, only a small share of the population will have what it takes to seriously pursue a career in national politics. Some people who seem like they could be in with a chance – great undergraduate results, high verbal intelligence, charisma and persuasiveness – come to us looking for advice on their career.

If you were one of these people and actually tried to become a member of Congress, your odds would be much higher than 1 in 600,000 – but how much higher exactly?

It’s not straightforward to find a way to make progress. Nevertheless, we think we have found an approach that can get us in the right ballpark for some kinds of people. The method we will use is called reference class forecasting. In reference class forecasting you find a group that you are a member of and see what share of people in that group succeed.¹

Who makes it to Congress?

If you want to know how closely you resemble existing members of Congress the paper to start with is ‘Membership of the 114th Congress: A Profile‘, from the Congressional Research Service. It is full of striking facts about who is in Congress and who isn’t. A few that stood out were:

• 213 of the 535 members of Congress had law degrees and 201 gave their occupation as ‘Law’;
• 102 of 535 had previously worked as Congressional staffers;
• 267 of 535 had previously been state or territory legislators while 41 are former Mayors;
• Almost all have Bachelors degrees and 98 have Masters degrees, but just 21 have Doctoral degrees;
• for some reason, 19 had been insurance agents.

From staffer to member

Let’s look first at ex-Congressional staffers. At any point in time there are 15,000 politically-oriented staffers working in Congress. Assuming that on average each of them spends 5 years working there, this suggests there are 100,000 present and past Congressional staffers between the ages of 40 and 75 (the key age demographic for members of Congress). 102 of that 100,000, or 1 in 1,000, are currently members of Congress. The odds of being in Congress at some point in time are better than this though – the average member of Congress leaves after 12 years in office, which means the membership of Congress turns over three times while you are in the age range during which you can plausibly run. This raises the odds of a random ex-Congressional staffer being elected to Congress at some point in their life to 1 in 330.

If you became a Congressional staffer with the goal of being elected to Congress, and think you have a plausible shot, you wouldn’t be just any old staffer though. To make this advice more useful to you, we need to look at the success rate for a different set of people: Congressional staffers who actually aspire to one day become members of Congress ². Unfortunately, I know of no good data on what share of staffers fall into this category, though I would love to find a survey ³. My intuitive guess, which could be wrong, is that 1 in 8 staffers are in this group. If that is right, their rate of getting elected at some point is closer to 1 in 40, down from 1 in 600,000 for a random member of the public. Now we’re talking!

From interpreting the law to making it

Let’s consider another group that is massively over-represented in Congress – graduates of prestigious law schools. Harvard Law School (HLS) turns out about 580 graduates each year, and has 18 alumni in Congress. There should be about 20,000 HLS graduates between the ages of 40 and 75, so as for staffers, about 1 in 1,100 are in Congress. Given the average Congressional tenure of 12 years, and a window of opportunity to be elected of 35 years, their odds of getting into Congress at some point rises to 1 in 375.

And what if you’re one of the minority of HLS graduates who actually wants to join Congress? Presumably this raises your chances a great deal. Here we consulted contacts at HLS about how many people there would seriously contemplate running for Congress. They estimated between 1 in 30 and 1 in 50. This was lower than I expected, but then again, 93% of HLS graduates join the bar within 10 months, suggesting they are looking to use all of that legal training to practise law, at least to begin with.

Assuming only HLS students who would consider running for Congress are ever elected, these figures suggest that between 1 in 8 and 1 in 12 might ultimately succeed. I ran the numbers and they are also within a factor of 2 of this for Yale Law School, Georgetown University Law School and the University of Texas Law School, so this isn’t just a Harvard thing. The most prestigious private and state school are very overrepresented though.

Does this mean you should become a Congressional staffer?

If you want to become a member of Congress, does the above mean you should set out to become a staffer or lawyer to boost your chances? Maybe, but it’s not completely obvious. Part of the explanation for Congressional staffers being so much more successful at getting elected is the experience and network they accumulate while working in DC. But part of the explanation is just the kind of people they were when they became staffers in the first place: obsessed with politics and able to get a very competitive job. I can’t pull apart the size of these two effects with the data we have here. Nonetheless, I would say that becoming a Congressional staffer is among the most tried and tested stepping-stones to elected office available, and a great indication that you have what it takes to succeed (with chances in the range of 1 in 10 and 1 in 100).

What does this mean for you?

Because entry into Congress is so selective, I suspect that a small number of graduates from prestigious law schools have a very high probability of getting elected, while the majority have almost no hope. If you are an ex-con or have facial tattoos, going to Harvard Law School isn’t going to raise your chances that much. If your surname is Kennedy and you have a handsome jawline… well, you probably know you’re a strong bet even if you can’t see yourself sitting through years of lectures on jurisprudence.

The ‘most likely to get elected’ group probably overlaps very heavily with those who could see themselves running, so if for any reason you can’t imagine wanting to be a politician or being good at the job, your chances are probably pretty negligible. The traits I expect the most promising candidates to possess include: charisma, strong self-belief, mainstream political views for their home district, and for adults, existing contacts in the political system.

But let’s say you’re highly motivated, think you’re a pretty good fit for national politics, and believe you have what it takes to make it through one of the country’s top law schools, or work as a Congressional staffer. In that case, these numbers suggest your odds of actually making it are probably better than 1 in 100. If you are among the more politically-savvy members of these groups, your chances might even be better than 1 in 10.

What if you aren’t the kind of person who could be a Congressional staffer or attend law school? Unless you can fit into some other political niche represented in Congress, your odds are probably worse than 1 in 100. To get a better idea, we would want to investigate a reference class you do belong to, or at least one that’s similarly as competitive or talented, and figure out what their rate of success is. As it is, these figure provide an ‘anchor’ against which you can say your odds are higher or lower, though it’s hard to say by exactly how much.

Are these odds high enough to bother?

To me these odds look pretty good for such an exclusive and influential role. But from another perspective they are demoralisingly low. Would you be willing to work incredibly hard for years with just a 1 in 100 chance of achieving your ultimate goal? Many wouldn’t, but I think they should be open to it:

• The most common paths to Congress, like law school, working in Congress, or becoming a state legislator, are pretty decent careers regardless, even if you never do make it to Congress (though we have some concerns about law school and know of fewer top cause areas that can be addressed at the state government level). If you decide at 35 that your dream of being a member of Congress is unlikely to be fulfilled, in the meantime you will have built up a lot of ‘career capital‘ that you can then turn towards other important goals.

• The US Federal Budget is simply enormous at $4 trillion every single year. By money spent, it’s the single largest organisation in the world. If responsibility for this spending were divided evenly among all existing members of Congress, it would come to an eye-popping $7.5 billion each. Even if only 10% of this money can actually be redirected based on the opinions of members of Congress, that is still $750 million you could shift each year on average. A 1 in 100 chance of having that power is still worth $7.5 million in expectation. On top of that, Congress has enormously important regulatory power over Americans’ lives, oversight of foreign policy and more. I don’t know exactly how much that is worth in terms of billions of dollars of spending, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it made the membership of Congress twice as influential as the dollar figures above suggest.

Our key uncertainties about this career track are: how much, if anything, elected officials can actually achieve; what personal characteristics make you a good fit for politics; how well people with an effectiveness-focussed and altruistic mindset, and a pragmatic approach to solving problems, can fare in politics.

If you’d like to read more analysis of this type, please sign up to our newsletter. We would also love to hear from people considering entering American politics, or of ways we can improve the numbers above.

Thanks to: Carl Shulman and Ben Todd.

The post What are your chances of getting elected to Congress, if you try? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Introduction

Previously, we introduced a way to assess career opportunities in terms of their potential for positive social impact, but which careers actually do best on these criteria? In this post, we’ll apply an adapted version of this framework to some career paths that seem particularly promising for recent graduates. Using what we’ve learned over the past two years of research and from coaching over 100 people, we’ll provide a ranked list of options.

Summary

• If you’re looking to build career capital, consider entrepreneurship, consulting or an economics PhD.
• If you’re looking to pursue earning to give, consider high-end finance, tech entrepreneurship, law, consulting and medicine. These careers are all high-earning in part due to being highly demanding. Our impression is that software engineering, being an actuary and dentistry are somewhat less demanding but also highly paid.
• If you’d like to make an impact more directly, consider party politics, founding effective nonprofits, working inside international organisations, government or foundations to improve them, and doing valuable academic research.
• If you’d like to advocate for effective causes, consider party politics, journalism, and working in international organisations, policy-oriented civil service or foundations.
• Some career paths that look promising overall are: tech entrepreneurship, consulting, party politics, founding effective nonprofits and working in international organisations.
• Some paths we think are promising but are largely neglected by our members and would like to learn more about are: party politics, working in international organisations, being a program manager at a foundation, journalism, policy-oriented civil service and marketing.

Why a ranking?

Lots of people who receive our coaching start with little idea about what they could do. Their question is just, ‘What are my options?’ For people who already have a couple of good options on the table, one of the most common questions asked is, ‘Have I overlooked something good?’ The purpose of this list is to help answer these questions.

Of course, a ranking of career paths has significant limitations. The career in which you can have the most social impact depends in large part on which careers you’ll be good at. On the other hand, we think there are some useful things to be said about which careers are promising in general, which we explain below.

Nevertheless, if there’s a career path you think you can excel on, take it very seriously even if it’s lower in the rankings. Equally, don’t feel bad about dismissing one if you think you’d be bad on it. Either way, watch out: in our experience people often overestimate their current chances of success in difficult paths, but they underestimate their potential to grow, learn new skills and transform the set of opportunities open to them in the future. You can learn a lot in just a couple of years if you really try!

Another limitation is the diversity of career opportunities. Many do not fit neatly into a widely applicable category. There are also substantial differences within each category. We, however, have focused on broad options that are widely known and have come up in our coaching. There are other options, which we haven’t yet assessed, so just because an option isn’t on this list, doesn’t mean it’s not promising. Consider what other options might be open to you by asking around your network for jobs, speaking with interesting organisations and keeping your eyes open for opportunities. This list is just a starting point and it’s still important to make an individual assessment of your unique options. If you would like individualised help choosing your career, consider our one-on-one coaching.

Finally, we’d like to stress that the assessments this list is based on are just informed judgement calls. The answers can be controversial, and we expect them to change significantly as we learn more (the rating factors are also likely to change). We also don’t present our full reasoning here. Nevertheless, you have to choose a career, so we think it’s better to give you our best guesses and then revise them over time, than to wait until we have only solid results (a day which may never come), especially because we’ve had lots of requests to share our thinking. We plan to deepen our research on each option as they arise in our case studies.

Before we begin discussing which careers might be particularly promising, don’t forget: you can make a huge difference in any career. Sometimes the best option won’t be to pursue one of these jobs – it’ll be to do something completely different and have a positive impact in a different way.

In the rest of this post, we:

1. Explain how we ranked career paths
2. Present our current list of best careers
3. Give an overview of our reasoning for each career
4. Suggest how you might use this ranking
5. Overview our research process

What factors did we use?

We chose factors that we think are: (i) important – play a significant role in determining your potential for social impact in the long-run, (ii) generalizable – can be applied to most careers, (iii) tractable – given what we currently know, it’s possible to distinguish careers on these factors.

1. Career capital

Career capital refers to the skills, connections and credentials you can gain from the specified career path, which help you to gain better opportunities for social impact in the future.

We considered questions like:

1. How impressive is having this career?
2. Do you gain qualifications that open doors to good options?
3. Do you build valuable, transferable skills, or are the skills narrower?
4. How influential are the people you’ll meet?
5. Do you have control over how you spend your time?

2. Potential for direct contribution

This is how much potential you’ll have to make an impact directly through the work you’ll do, taking account of what would have happened otherwise.

We considered questions like:

1. How high-priority is the cause you’ll be contributing to through your direct work?
2. How much potential to cause change does this career path seem to offer (e.g. budgets influenced, people reached)?
3. What are your chances of success?
4. To what extent will your work in this field displace others from the field, versus expand the field? To what extent might you be able to ‘pull the rope sideways’ and bring about change that wouldn’t have ordinarily happened?

3. Potential for donations

Careers differ a large amount in earning potential, and since your donations can do a huge amount of good, this is also important to consider.

We mainly based this on our impressions of which careers are highest earning, though it’s also important to remember that some careers incur more lifestyle costs (e.g. if you have to live in New York). We based our estimates of earning potential on:

1. How high do the earnings go over time?
2. What are your chances of success? What are the typical dropout rates?
3. How quickly do you receive the earnings and do you have to pay for expensive training?

4. Potential for advocacy

Often it seems possible to have more impact through promoting effective causes than through what you do directly. At the same time, careers seem to differ in their potential for advocacy, so we think this is another important factor to consider.

We considered questions like:
1. How influential are the people you’ll meet on this career path?
2. How prestigious is this career?
3. How many people might you have a chance to meet? Will you have much free time?

How did we weight the factors?

The last three factors are proxies for your potential for immediate impact, which we weighted equally.

We think it’s highly important to keep your options open and prioritise capacity-building early in your career, so we think career capital is comparably important to immediate impact, so weighted it 3 times greater than the other factors.

Who is the assessment applicable to?

We aimed to make the assessment useful to a typical user of 80,000 Hours: a motivated, altruistic graduate in their twenties. Moreover, we added the condition that ‘they could plausibly get the career in the ranking given their current situation.’ So, when we rate journalism higher than law, we mean: it seems like a better opportunity for a motivated, altruistic graduate in their twenties, who could plausibly get into either law or journalism.

The list

What might be some of the most promising career paths for recent graduates? Here’s a summary table. Later, we’ll explain these options and our reasoning behind them in a little more depth.

Note that the numbers are just a relative ranking. ‘5’ means ‘very good relative to the other options’, ‘3’ means ‘average’, and ‘1’ means ‘unfavoured relative to the others on the list.’ The numbers do not indicate any scale.

Skip ahead to find more about each:

1. Tech entrepreneurship
2. Consulting
3. Party politics
4. Founding effective nonprofits
5. Finance
6. Work in international organisations
7. Valuable academic research
8. Economics PhD
9. Software engineering
10. Medicine
11. Work at effective socially-oriented organisations
12. Foundation program manager
13. Journalism
14. Policy-oriented civil service
15. Law
16. Work in sales and marketing

Why these careers?

Tech entrepreneurship

What is it?

Tech entrepreneurship involves founding new companies in the technology and biotechnology industries with the aim of achieving large-scale positive effects. You can enter this path straight from university if you can find co-founders and an idea, but people enter this path from many stages in their career. A highly useful first step is learning to program. It can also be useful to gain some general business experience, especially from working in a small company. After starting, many people aim to join an ‘incubator’, most famously, Ycombinator, before moving on to receive venture capital funding. Schemes like Entrepreneur First aim to help you before you even have an idea or co-founder. There can also be entrepreneurial opportunities within large companies (‘intrapreneurship’).

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 5
Direct contribution: 3
Donations potential: 5
Advocacy potential: 3

Tech entrepreneurship seems to be one of the highest-earning careers,¹ offering great potential for earning to give. But it also offers far more leverage if a product that makes a big difference is developed. It gives excellent career capital, because you’ll rapidly learn highly useful entrepreneurial skills, and starting a company looks impressive on your CV. It scores moderately on advocacy potential, because being a founder in the tech industry will let you meet entrepreneurial, influential people.

Entrepreneurship outside of technology also seems of high potential, but ranks lower in terms of expected earnings, usefulness of the skills and your chances of improving society with your products. We add ‘aiming at large scale’, because there are many entrepreneurs who aim only to set up small businesses like restaurants or shops – a substantially different type of opportunity.

Who might it suit?

If you’re going to be working on the product side of things, being a great programmer, hacker or designer is what’s needed. The business side requires salespeople with strong social skills, who are able to cut deals and persuade key stakeholders to back the venture. Early on, you’ll need to be well rounded, since 2-3 people will do everything. Tech entrepreneurs strike us as smart and very gritty. You’ll have to be able to work very hard, spend years living on little money and be able to deal with a high risk of failure. On the other hand, the work can be highly motivating, since you have a huge amount of autonomy and interesting, challenging work. For more, see our work on the predictors of success in entrepreneurship.

Further reading

• Read our summary of the case for tech entrepreneurship
• All our resources on entrepreneurship
• The Founder’s Dilemmas – evidence-based exploration of how to take the right decisions as a founder
• Paul Graham’s Essays – widely regarded as the key resource for would-be founders
• The Lean Startup and 4 Steps to Ephiphany – widely regarded as the leading introductions to best-practice entrepreneurial strategy.

Consulting

What is it?

Management consultants provide advice to organisations to help improve performance. Consultants divide into two broad types: strategy and operations. Strategy consultants advise management teams on top-level decisions like how much to invest in research and development, how to structure the organisation and how to deal with competitive threats. Operations consulting is more about how to implement strategy, for instance; how to improve the efficiency of the recruitment process, or implement a new sales strategy. Consultants may also specialise in highly technical areas. The industry is divided into the ‘Big 3’ strategy consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, BCG), the ‘Big 4’ professional services firms (PwC, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, KPMG) who do operations consulting (as well as auditing and accounting), and a large number of small ‘boutique’ companies, who often specialise in a particular type of situation or subject matter.

You start this career by joining a graduate scheme after graduating. Or you can join later after receiving a graduate degree, in particular an MBA. Some people work their way up consultancy to become a partner, but many aim to exit into high-level corporate jobs (e.g. CEO) or a wide variety of other options, including policy, nonprofits, graduate study, asset management and start-ups.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 5
Direct contribution: 2
Donations potential: 4
Advocacy potential: 2.5

The more important reason to do consultancy is career capital. It’s a high status, impressive credential, especially if you consult for one of the Big 3, which shows you can work hard. You get intense training in general business skills, and experience of a wide range of organisations. Moreover, you interact with clients from the start, who tend to be senior people in government and business, and work with colleagues who will pursue a wide range of leadership roles in the future. The large consultancies promote themselves as passports to future careers, and provide services to help with this, such as an extensive alumni network and paying for your MBA.

We think consulting primarily makes an impact through earning to give, but consultants generally earn less than people in finance at each stage in their career, so we rate it lower for earning potential.

If you’re interested, you could also consider careers in accountancy (e.g. at the Big 4 professional services firms), though they generally seem lower-paid than strategy consultants at each level and the career capital is less useful.

Who might it suit?

We think it suits someone with a well-rounded profile of good analytical skills, social skills and the ability to work hard. Compared to the other careers in the list, the verbal and social skills seem particularly important since you need to interact with and persuade clients from the start. Consultants also have to travel extensively, since they generally work where their client is based, which some people find very tiresome. The work is probably more interesting than many other corporate jobs, including the early years of finance, because it involves more problem solving and variety.

More reading:

• Find out about consulting jobs and firms by using this list of firms.
• The Vault Guide to Consulting is a good guide on how to get in. The case interview is a particularly significant part of the selection process, and you can find out more about that here and on the consultancy company websites.
• All our resources on Consulting.

Party politics

This profile is focused on the UK

What is it?

Party politics means joining a party with the aim of being elected to office. Careers in this path often start by becoming an advisor or researcher for a politician, then seeking to rise up the party ranks. You could also start your career as a journalist or lawyer, though it’s more common in the UK to be a career politician.

We suspect there are other highly promising roles within politics, the civil service and international organisations, as highlighted below, but we guess that party politics is the best.

We haven’t done research into the US political system, so this section is primarily about the UK. Our impression of the US is that it’s much more normal to start your career in some other area, and then move into running for office later. We suspect it would also be a highly promising option.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 3
Direct contribution: 5
Donations potential: 2
Advocacy potential: 5

Being elected is an opportunity for huge leverage over the government budget, regulation and the space of ideas. Of course, most people have a very small chance of making it. Nevertheless, our impression is that the chance is large enough that it’s still a highly influential path in expectation, at least for certain types of people. Our main uncertainty is that we’re not sure how much better you can be, compared to the people who already go into politics.

We also rate it a bit lower for career capital, because we’re not sure how useful the early years of politics are for building up your general skills and CV. There’s a risk that the career capital is mainly only relevant to political and policy careers, so if your political career fails (which seems likely), then you might not be left in a great position. However, you’ll still have good options within think-tanks and other government organisations.

Who might it suit?

Politics requires really strong social skills – you have to talk to huge numbers of people and get them behind you. There’s a strong correlation between success in this field and graduating from Oxford or Cambridge, studying PPE at Oxford, and being successful in student politics, though it’s unclear how much of this is causal and how much is due to the most motivated people picking these paths. You’ll need to be comfortable with having your personal life in the limelight and staying committed to your values in the face of tough political trade-offs.

Further reading

• All our resources on politics
• Coachees interested in politics have recommended reading of Parliamentary Affairs, talking to people in the field, and reading biographies of politicians to learn more about what it’s like and how to succeed. (Also, as some insiders have recommended(!), watching The West Wing and The Thick of It).

Founding effective nonprofits

What is it?

Founding effective nonprofits means starting new organisations with the explicit aim of addressing a high-priority cause in an effective way. Generally, this career path requires several years’ experience within a cause, and within the nonprofit sector or corporate sector before starting your own project.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 4
Direct contribution: 5
Donations potential: 1
Advocacy potential: 4

Setting up a new organisation is an opportunity for huge leverage. If you can set up the nonprofit in an effective area, then you can contribute to a top cause. Moreover, many effective causes seem somewhat constrained by entrepreneurial talent (e.g. there seems to be a shortage of people able to implement the interventions that have been proven effective in the academic development literature). Our main doubts are that we’re unsure about typical chances of success and setting up a new organisation generally involves compromising your flexibility to switch cause, which we think is important.

Turning to the other factors, being entrepreneurial in the social sector seems to give you good potential for advocacy. On the other hand, the earnings are usually terrible! As with tech entrepreneurship, it’s a strong option for career capital, because it’s impressive and teaches you highly useful entrepreneurial skills. It can also build your network within an important cause. We don’t give it a ‘5’ in this field however, because our impression is that it’s harder to start a significant nonprofit than a for-profit, so you have to spend more years building up to being a founder. For instance, for-profit start-ups have a large ecosystem of incubators to support entrepreneurs, but the same does not exist for nonprofits.

Who might it suit?

Similar to tech entrepreneurship above, although tech skills are less important in this career choice. Instead, it’s important to have a deep understanding of the relevant cause.

Further reading

• All our resources on founding effective nonprofits.

Finance

What is it?

Finance means working in the financial industry, which allocates capital across the economy. In particular, we mean jobs in ‘high finance’, like investment banking, asset management and private equity. Careers in this path generally start by joining a graduate scheme after university as an ‘analyst’ (especially in investment banking), and then working up the roles in the face of high attrition. You have a second chance to enter investment banking as an ‘associate’ after working for several years and doing an MBA. The most common entry route is through investment banking, which leads into other roles in asset management and private equity, but you can also enter these roles directly.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 4
Direct contribution: 1
Donations potential: 5
Advocacy potential: 3

We think finance jobs primarily have the potential to make a difference through earning to give. On this front, they are among the best, because finance is a good candidate for the highest-earning career. Advocacy potential is moderate, because you’ll be able to meet lots of rich people as colleagues. On the other hand, we don’t rate direct contribution highly, because there are significant doubts about whether finance makes a positive economic contribution at the margin. That said, there may be potential to promote improvements to finance from within the industry (like those reviewed by the Copenhagen Consensus), and to do other socially useful activities like developing social impact bonds.

Finance is also good for career capital, because several years in finance is a strong signal of ability and work ethic. You receive intense corporate training, and you develop a network of wealthy and influential people.

Within finance, we think asset management (including hedge funds, mutual funds, private equity and VC) is the best path, since it seems to offer higher average pay, more interesting work and better hours, though it’s also more competitive. If you have strong mathematical skills, then the quantitative trading firms like D.E. Shaw and Jane St. seem particularly attractive.

Who might it suit?

Finance generally requires a degree from a top university and a rounded profile of abilities. The ‘deal making’ tracks in investment banking and private equity require more social and sales skills, whereas the asset management and research tracks require more analytical skills. There are also roles which require strong quantitative skills, which are often especially well-paid. You need to be very hard working, able to cope with pressure and get by without much sleep. In the early stages, the work seems relatively uninteresting (lots of preparing of Powerpoint documents and financial models) but you gain autonomy and more challenging work later.

Further reading

• All our resources on finance.
• The Money Machine gives an overview of what finance does.
• Careers in finance gives an overview of the different roles available in finance.
• Wall Street Oasis is one of the largest online communities for finance jobs.
• Mergers and Inquisitions has lots of information on investment banking careers.
• You can find out more about what asset management can be like by reading biographies of famous investors.

Work in international organisations

What is it?

This means pursuing work at organisations like the World Bank, World Health Organisation, International Monetary Fund and United Nations. It can be possible to enter these organisations directly from graduate studies (ideally in a relevant area), but it seems much more common to start by building a career elsewhere since these positions are highly competitive. A few common paths include: (i) the world of think-tanks and policy-oriented civil service, (ii) consultancy and MBAs, (iii) nonprofit management, (iv) economics academia, focusing on a high priority area. Which of these is best depends on which international organisation you’re aiming at, and what types of positions you’re aiming for.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 3
Direct contribution: 4
Donations potential: 2
Advocacy potential: 4.5

These positions may offer the opportunity to influence substantial budgets, since these organisations govern huge pools of aid money and international regulation. Typically in these organisations the average budget per employee is on the order of US$1m.² We’re highly uncertain about the expected size of the influence, and how much the effectiveness of the spending can be improved.

This career path is of a similar type to foundation program management and policy-oriented civil service, as described below. Compared to those, it seems more competitive, but this may be offset by greater focus on high-priority areas and a better network.

These organisations are highly influential over important global challenges, so you’ll be working with highly influential people, which increases our assessment of advocacy potential and career capital. We also rate the career capital highly, since these positions are highly prestigious.

Who might it fit?

It seems to require a well-rounded profile: good social skills, analytical skills and high motivation. Some roles are more tilted towards research, whereas others are more about management and negotiation. You’ll also need to be comfortable working in a large, and potentially bureaucratic organisation.

Further reading

• How to get a job at the UN

Valuable academic research

What is it?

‘Valuable academic research’ means a position in a university to carry out research within high-priority causes. Careers in this field start by doing a PhD, and then working your way up to tenured professor. In addition to the research itself, some academics become public intellectuals or become involved in policy.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 3
Direct contribution: 4
Donations potential: 2
Advocacy potential: 4

Research has the potential to create a huge amount of value, and progress often seems constrained by a lack of good researchers. If you might be a good fit for research, then you could make a big contribution. One disadvantage, however, is that it’s difficult to radically change your cause within an academic career, which we think is important, although this varies from field to field: social scientists seem to have a fairly large degree of flexibility, whereas lab scientists are relatively constrained to their particular area. In addition, some academic fields have become highly competitive, reducing chances of success. Academic positions have credibility and you have a lot of flexibility in how you spend your time, especially after securing tenure, which can also be good for advocacy. In particular, you may have the opportunity to join grant committees, and influence large amounts of academic funding.

Career capital depends on the field. Quantitative, scientific subjects and economics can open up opportunities in industry and entrepreneurship. Subjects with policy relevance, like economics, also open up government positions. Overall, however, we don’t rank it at the top, because the training process takes a long time, it’s highly competitive, and the training mainly prepares you for careers within academia, rather than developing a broad network and portfolio of skills.

Who might it fit?

IQ seems more important in research than in the other options on the list. It’s also highly important to be able to develop strong motivation for your subject, because the field is competitive, failure is common, and it’ll mainly be down to you to choose projects and make grant applications. The lifestyle can be good, with high autonomy, interesting work and shorter hours than the other careers, but it depends on the subject and stage of your career. Pre-tenure, hours are often very long. Lab science is notorious for needing very long hours early in your career.

Further reading

• All our resources on research.

Economics PhD

What is it?

Studying a doctorate in economics. This is not a full career path (it’s part of the ‘valuable academic research’ path), but doing a PhD is a significant step that often shows up in our discussions independently of going into academia, so we decided to include it separately on the list. We highlight economics because it seems like the most promising PhD subject for the goals in question, for the reasons given below. We also think, however, that many other PhDs can be a great step, especially in subjects like applied mathematics, statistics and computer science.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 4
Direct contribution: 2
Donations potential: 1
Advocacy potential: 3

This option is mainly about gaining career capital. An Economics PhD gives good job prospects. In particular, it opens the door to economics academia, which seems a particularly high-potential area of academia, and can lead to careers in policy, foundations and some parts of finance for earning to give. You can find an overview of the arguments in favour here.

Who might it suit?

Similar to academic research above. Also note that economics requires strong mathematical skills, but it’s possible to enter without having studied economics at undergraduate (perhaps through a one year conversion course). Find more information on how to be admitted here.

Further reading

• All our resources on economics PhDs.

Software engineering

What is it?

Software engineers design, develop and maintain software. This career path generally involves learning to program (either by yourself, at university, in a company, or through one of the increasing numbers of training academies), and then joining a software company and working your way up in seniority. Learning to program is also a good first step into the world of tech entrepreneurship and is sought after in academic research, or can be pursued freelance alongside other projects.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 3
Direct contribution: 2
Donations potential: 3
Advocacy potential: 2.5

You can often enter a moderately well-paid job in software after just a year or so of learning to program. Salaries can rise rapidly to around US$100,000 per year in the first couple of years, and up to $200,000 in top tech companies, but they generally level out faster than in consulting or law, except for a small number of star or entrepreneurial engineers. Overall, the career is good for earning to give.

Software engineers can also make some direct contributions to innovation and economic productivity, especially if working for a good company. Advocacy potential is moderately good because you can be involved in the influential and innovative tech community.

Career capital is moderate, since these jobs mainly establish your credibility in the tech industry. On the other hand, programming and data analysis skills are widely in demand, so we mark it up for this.

Who might it suit?

This is a good career for people with an analytical side. There’s some evidence to suggest that the distribution of programming talent divides into two halves: those who find it relatively easy and those who don’t. So, it’s a priority in this career to find out which group you fall into. Fortunately, you can test this relatively quickly by trying a couple of free online programming courses and seeing whether you enjoy it. If you make it in, the lifestyle seems good. The work can involve solving interesting puzzles in innovative companies, the hours are reasonable, and it’s comparatively easy to find opportunities to work remotely or part-time.

Further reading

• All our resources on software.

Medicine

What is it?

By ‘medicine’ we mean studying a medical degree, and then working as a doctor in a hospital or other healthcare setting, potentially also including participating in medical research and consultancy.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 2.5
Direct contribution: 3
Donations potential: 3.5
Advocacy potential: 2.5

Medicine is a high-earning career – potentially the top earning option for people who don’t want to enter finance or entrepreneurship (especially in the US, where salaries are about 30% higher than in other developed world countries). Although lower-earning than finance, the chances of dropping out are much lower once you’ve made it into medical school. This means you can contribute through earning to give. We don’t think doctors make a large direct contribution through their hospital work, though they have the option to get involved in medical research, innovation in the medical system and public health, which can all be high leverage opportunities. We rate it moderately for advocacy potential, since it’s a highly respected career in which you can meet lots of people.

Medicine is a highly valuable qualification, since it gives you a lot of good options (being a doctor, research, public health, biotech industry). However, it’s expensive (the average debt is $170,000 on graduation in the US) and takes 5-6 years, so we only rate it moderately for career capital.

Note that there are many other healthcare careers that offer lower but still very good pay, where demand is growing fast, training is cheaper and the hours are better than medicine. This includes careers like pharmacy, audiology, occupational therapy and dentistry (almost as high-earning as medicine). These could be good alternative options for earning to give.

Who might it suit?

Medicine is good for scientifically inclined people who don’t want to enter finance or tech entrepreneurship. It’s also less risky, so good if you want a safer choice. The work seems interesting and varied. On the other hand, it generally requires very long hours, with some variation depending on your speciality.

Further reading

• All our resources on medicine.

Working at effective socially-oriented organisations

What is it?

This is a bit of a catch-all category, but we wanted to highlight that one approach to finding a good career is seeking out outstanding, effective organisations and taking a job with them.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 3
Direct contribution: 4
Donations potential: 1
Advocacy potential: 2

Many people can have a large impact by identifying a great, socially-oriented organisation and taking a job where they have a strong comparative advantage. For instance, we’ve highlighted GiveWell and the Copenhangen Consensus as potential opportunities in this category. Note that it seems there are often important contributions to be made in unglamorous roles, which improve the effectiveness of the rest of the team.

Otherwise, we rate this moderately for career capital and advocacy potential, but much will depend on the organisation. We rate it low for donations potential, because typically these jobs are in the nonprofit or public sector, so have they lower salaries.

Who might it suit?

This depends entirely on the type of job.

Further reading

• You can see all our content on relevant organisations here. Also see the section on foundations below.
• You could also consider organisations that are backed by impact-oriented funders (e.g. those backed by the Gates Foundation).

Foundation program manager

What is it?

Working in a philanthropic foundation to distribute grant funds. Typically you start these careers by training in project management in a nonprofit organisation, doing consultancy or working in think-tanks. MBAs can be useful. You also often need a Master’s degree and subject area expertise. Then you join as a program manager, and work your way up the ranks.

This path is similar to policy-oriented civil service work and working in international organisations, and there’s considerable switching between the two, so you may also want to consider them as well.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 2
Direct contribution: 4
Donations potential: 2
Advocacy potential: 4

This career may offer significant potential to influence spending, since in many foundations, small teams allocate large pools of funding, often with considerable flexibility, and these jobs seem attainable. How much influence you have, however, will depend on the foundation, since some are highly constrained by their mandate. We don’t yet have a good picture of the typical scale of the opportunities. In addition, this is only an opportunity to do good if you can significantly improve the allocation of funds, and we’re not sure how large the room for improvement typically is. We also rate this career ‘4’ for advocacy potential, since awarding funds in a foundation could offer broader influence over the nonprofit sector.

We rate it relatively low for career capital, because although the connections could be good (especially in the nonprofit sector), it’s less clear that the skills and credentials are highly useful outside of foundations.

Some foundations that stand out are: the Arnold Foundation, a $4bn which is new and has an open-minded, ambitious effective altruist approach, potentially offering a significant opportunity to help shape their agenda; the Gates Foundation since it’s an extremely influential leader in evidence-based philanthropy; Good Ventures, which works very closely with GiveWell; and CIFF a $3bn evidence-driven global poverty foundation. In addition, you could seek to work at other large foundations to promote a more impact and evidence driven approach to giving from inside. See here for a list of the top US foundations. Focus on those that are open to funding a wide range of causes.

Who might it suit?

It seems to require a rounded skillset. Since the impact depends on being able to improve practices within the foundation world, it also requires good persuasion skills and deep subject knowledge.

Journalism

What is it?

Journalists work in the media to spread and analyse news and information. This career path involves joining a graduate scheme after university (perhaps after studying a Master’s in journalism, and doing internships and building experience in related areas), then aiming to work up the ranks in seniority, for instance to editor of a major newspaper. Many people also enter journalism after establishing themselves in another field, like politics or academia.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 2
Direct contribution: 4
Donations potential: 1
Advocacy potential: 4

Journalists have a very strong platform for spreading important ideas, both through the stories they write and the influential people they meet. If used to promote effective causes, this can be enormously impactful. We don’t rate it more highly, however, because it seems like an extremely competitive career. Many people want to be journalists, while demand is falling due to the rise of online media.

We don’t rate it highly for career capital, because the skills don’t seem broadly applicable to many other fields, and because it’s highly competitive. Salaries are usually relatively low, so we put donation potential at ‘1’.

Who might it suit?

Journalism requires strong verbal abilities and writing skills. Due to its competitiveness, it also requires grit. You can test out your potential by getting involved in student journalism and attempting to secure internships.

Policy-oriented Civil Service

What is it?

By ‘Civil Service’ we mean seeking jobs in administration within the government, and working your way up the ranks. Note that it’s becoming more and more common to switch in and out of the civil service at different stages of your career – going between the Civil Service and think-tanks, international organisations, academia or the corporate sector. We add the qualifier ‘policy-oriented’ because many civil servants focus on providing services, which seems to offer less opportunity for impact than those who focus on developing and implementing policy. Many countries have career paths with accelerated promotion and training (e.g. the Fast Stream in the UK), which seem to offer much better career capital and influence.

This is a fairly similar type of path to working in international organisations and foundations, so you may also want to consider them.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 2
Direct contribution: 3
Donations potential: 2
Advocacy potential: 4

In the Civil Service, you have scope for direct impact through improving the development and implementation of policy. Although your influence might be slight, the scale is very large, so your overall impact has the potential to be large. On the other hand, we’re very uncertain about this path, for instance, we don’t know how much scope for improvement there is in policy-setting. Overall, we prefer party politics, because the influence seems much larger and more flexible. While there are thousands of party politicians in the UK, there are almost half a million civil servants. Even subtracting the majority, who are not substantially involved in policy, party politics seems to come out better for influence.

To maximise your impact within this path, seek out departments that are involved with the causes you think are most high-priority. For instance, if you want to work on development in the UK, aim at DfiD. Some departments may also offer significantly more scope for influence than others, for instance the grant-writing agencies are unglamorous but offer influence over large budgets; however, we don’t yet have much information about the differences between agencies.

Salaries are not great – comparable or only slightly better than academic salaries, but worse than corporate salaries. On the other hand, advocacy potential seems high since you can meet policy-makers.

Career capital strikes us as worse than comparable jobs in the corporate sector, since Civil Service jobs are less respected in the corporate sector, the work is less intense and progression seems slow. Accelerator schemes, like the Fast Stream, however, are substantially different. They raise you into management roles in just a few years and are fairly prestigious.

Who might it suit?

We think it’s probably similar to the foundation manager job, though the higher responsibility positions (e.g. in accelerator schemes) will require better social skills, since you’ll be managing a lot of people, and the ability to make decisions under pressure. How stimulating the work is varies depending on your project and department. Hours seem better than in the corporate sector, but some complain about a slower pace and more bureaucracy.

Law

What is it?

By Law we mean studying for a law degree and then practicing law in the US as an attorney, counsel or solicitor, or in the UK as a barrister or solicitor. In particular, we mean ‘high end law’, since there are really two law job markets.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 2.5
Direct contribution: 1
Donations potential: 4
Advocacy potential: 2.5

Law is a high-earning career, which so you can make a difference through earning to give. We rank it lower on donation potential than finance, however, because the earnings generally seem lower at each stage, once you factor in legal training. Lawyers can also contribute by helping to create an effective legal system, but our overall impression is that the direct contribution is not large compared to that in other careers because it’s not neglected and some aspects of law seem zero-sum (Moreover, there’s widely thought to be a trade-off between earnings and positive direct contribution.)

A law degree provides reasonable career capital, since it’s an impressive qualification, it helps with entering policy careers and it allows you to practice law for earning to give. Nevertheless, law degrees are expensive and competitive, and since the skills seem less generally useful, we rank law lower than finance.

Who might it suit?

Law is often among the most high-earning options for people with strong verbal abilities, but relatively weaker numerical ability. As with many of these careers, you’ll need to be prepared to work very long hours. The work seems less interesting and to cause higher stress than in some other careers, reflected in higher rates of depression among lawyers.

Further reading

• All our resources on Law

Work in sales and marketing

What is it?

Sales and marketing refers to a group of roles in the corporate sector, involving understanding the desires of customers, advertising and selling. The career path could involve entering a sales or marketing job after university (there are many marketing graduate schemes), and then aiming to rise up the corporate ladder, either to a VP of Sales or other management role.

Note that people considering this path also often consider working in public relations, which also offers many graduates schemes, and can be preparation for journalism or political work.

Why is it a good opportunity?

Career capital: 3
Direct contribution: 1
Donations potential: 2.5
Advocacy potential: 2

This seems like a good option for career capital. ‘Sales’ meant broadly as persuading people to exchange goods, is a highly important skill in many of the other careers listed. You could use corporate sales experience to transfer into the nonprofit sector, get involved in entrepreneurship, or work up the ranks of the higher-paying corporate jobs.

Sales jobs can be fairly well-paid, especially if you’re good at them, since the pay is often performance-based. The vital importance of sales and marketing to most companies means that sales and marketing is one of the highest-paid corporate positions (e.g. see here, though note the problems with these kinds of rankings), and it’s one route into the top corporate management positions. So this path could also be used for earning to give.

Within this path, working in small companies can lead to better skill-development and higher chances of promotion, whereas working in larger companies offers more widely recognisable credentials.

Who might it suit?

Sales jobs require people with good social skills who can handle rejection (which means high levels of optimism and grit). Sales work is potentially engaging due to rapid feedback on how you’re doing. Otherwise, we guess much depends on the company you’re working in.

Further reading

• Dan Pink’s To Sell Is Human argues that soft sales skills are very widely applicable and becoming increasingly important. He also outlines the scientific research about how to become better at selling.

How might you apply this list to your own situation?

1) Use the list to generate some initial ideas. Consider careers you think you could plausibly do well in.

2) Add extra ideas that you’ve come across or are unique to your situation.

3) Narrow down the careers using these criteria, but adapt the results to your own situation. For instance, if you love programming, then you might increase your expected direct impact, career capital and earnings potential in software and tech entrepreneurship.

4) Also compare your options, based on the following factors that are also proxies for impact:

• Fit: What are you chances of excelling in this career? If you can excel in a career, that dramatically increases your potential to contribute and gain career capital.
• Discovery value: (AKA value of information): If you embark on this career path, how much will you learn about which career paths are best for you, and which opportunities are best for making an impact?
• Corruption risk: What are the chances of losing your altruistic motivation if you embark on this path?

5) You might also want to compare careers based on personal factors like:

• Job satisfaction: Do I think the work will be engaging? Will you be able to maintain good relationships at work? Does this career use your strengths? Do you have the chance to excel?
• Fit with rest of life: To what extent will this career allow you to flourish in the rest of your life? For instance, will you be able to maintain good relationships with your family and friends, will you be able to support your family?

Do you know a good resource for one or more of these careers? Do you disagree with one of our scores? Would you like to propose a career we’ve overlooked? Please leave your ideas in the comments!

Thank you to Carl Shulman for comments on a draft, though he does not necessarily endorse the claims made. Thank you to Jacob Williamson for editing.

Appendix: Research process

We developed the factors using the process described at the start of the post. We generated options from our experience in coaching, picking the options that come up most commonly in graduate career choice and seem particularly promising. Note that if there were two similar options but one seemed better, we tended just to include the better one, although we tried to mention the other similar options where possible, e.g. tech entrepreneurship but not general entrepreneurship, consulting but not professional services.

We rated the options according to the factors using our judgement and we picked the top sixteen. We sought feedback on our reasoning from several research volunteers. Sketches of the reasoning for each option are provided in the body of the post. Some career options mentioned above, which we considered as major options in their own right but didn’t make it into the list were: working in a small company, teaching, dentistry, pharmacy and high-paying trades.

Some other options we’re thinking about but didn’t have space to consider: think-tanks, the executive track at a large company, being a philanthropic adviser, nonprofit consulting, working at a large nonprofit, data analysis, being an academic grant-writer, entrepreneurship outside of technology, being an actuary, and headhunting or executive search.

Notes and Footnotes

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