A lack of understanding and coordination between all these countries and the West means we might not tackle those challenges as well as we can (and need to).

So it’s going to be very valuable to have more people gaining real experience with emerging powers, especially China, and then specialising in the intersection of emerging powers and pressing global problems.

Why is experience with an emerging power (especially China) valuable?

China in particular plays a crucial role in many of the major global problems we highlight. For instance:

• The Chinese government ‘s spending on artificial intelligence research and development is estimated to be on the same order of magnitude as that of the US government.¹
• As the largest trading partner of North Korea, China plays an important role in reducing the chance of conflict, especially nuclear conflict, on the Korean peninsula.
• China is the largest emitter of CO2, accounting for 30% of the global total.²
• China recently became the largest consumer of factory-farmed meat.³
• China is one of the most important nuclear and military powers.
• As home to nearly 20% of the world’s population,⁴ it will play a central role in mitigating pandemics.
• China is increasingly a leader in developing new technologies; Beijing is widely seen as a serious competitor to Silicon Valley⁵ and is the majority source of non-US ‘unicorns.’⁶

As a result, it’s difficult to understand the scale and urgency of these pressing problems without understanding the situation in China. What’s more, it’ll be difficult to solve them without coordination between Western groups and their Chinese equivalents.

At the same time, China is not well understood in the West.

Interest in China has grown in the last decade, but it still lags behind many other countries. For instance, in American colleges and universities, the number of students studying French is three times larger than those studying Chinese,⁷ while the starting level of cultural difference is larger.

All this suggests that having experience with China could be an extremely useful skill for improving collaboration between China and the West on many of the world’s most pressing problems, avoiding potentially dangerous conflicts and arms-race-like dynamics, and improving the actions and policy of governments and institutions in both China and the West.

Of course, a similar argument could be made for gaining expertise in other powerful nations, for example: India, Brazil, or Russia.

However, we see Russia as likely to be less important than China because it has a weaker technology industry, so isn’t nearly as likely to play a leading role in AI or biotech development. It has a much smaller economy and population in general and hasn’t been growing at anywhere near the rate of China, so seems less likely to be a central global power in the future. Also, as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war, most Western citizens should probably avoid travelling to Russia.

For some similar reasons, India and Brazil also seem less likely to play a leading role in shaping new technologies than China. The existence of many English speakers in India also means there are more people able to fill the coordination gap already, reducing the need for additional specialists.

Given this, we’ve spent most of our time researching China. As a result, we focus less on other emerging powers in this article, and most of our specific examples focus on China.

However, we do think that gaining experience with these other countries is likely to be valuable and is currently under-explored, especially given how important they could become in the next few decades. In fact, if you’re at the beginning of your career, it may even be valuable to think about which countries are most likely to be particularly influential in a few decades and focus on gaining expertise there. Becoming an expert in any emerging global power could be a very high-impact option and could be the best option for some people.

What does building and using experience with an emerging power involve?

Building this skill set involves working in roles that will give you real opportunities to learn about an emerging power, especially in the context of trying to solve particularly pressing problems.

Ideally, you’ll pick one emerging power, and try to gain experience specifically in and about that country. This might include working in policy, as a foreign journalist, in some parts of the private sector, in philanthropy, in academic research, or in any number of other roles from which you’ll learn about an emerging power (some of which we discuss in more detail below).

These roles overlap with ways you might build and use other impactful skills, like research or communicating ideas. That’s because, in order to have an impact with your experience of an emerging power, you’ll usually need to use other skills as well: for example, you might be doing research on AI safety in China (using research skills), developing or implementing US foreign policy (using policy and political skills), or writing as a journalist in India (using communication skills).

The distinguishing feature of this skill is that you’ll build deep cultural knowledge, a broad network, and real expertise about an emerging power, which will open up unique and high-impact ways to contribute.

Working with foreign organisations on any topic requires an awareness of their culture, history, and current affairs, as well as good intuitions about how each side will react to different messages and proposals. This involves understanding issues like:

• What are attitudes like, in the emerging power you’re learning about, around doing good and social impact?
• If you wanted to make connections with people in the emerging power interested in working on major global challenges, what messages should you focus on, and what pitfalls might you face? How does professional networking function in the emerging power in general?

We expect that fully understanding these topics will require deep familiarity with the country’s values, worldviews, history, customs, and so on — noting, of course, that these also vary substantially within large countries like China, India, and Russia.

Eventually, you’ll move from building the skill to a position where you can use this experience to help solve pressing global problems. To use this skill best, you might also need to combine it with knowledge of a relevant subject — some of which we discuss here. We discuss some ways to have an impact with this skill in the final section below.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

This is likely to be a great option for you if you are from one of these countries, if you have spent a substantial amount of time there, or if you’re really obsessively interested in a particular country. This is because the best paths to impact likely require deep understanding of the relevant cultures and institutions, as well as language fluency (e.g. at the level where you might be able to write a newspaper article about biotechnology in the language).

If you’re not sure, you could study in one of these countries for a month, or do some other kind of short visit or project, to see how interesting you find it. (Although recent tension between the US and China could mean that spending significant time in China could exclude you from certain government positions in the US or other countries — many of which could be very high-impact career options — so this is a risk.)

Other signs you might be a great fit:

• Bilingualism or other cross-cultural communication skills. Experience living abroad or working in teams with highly diverse backgrounds could help build this.
• Strong networking abilities and social skills.
• Excellent judgement and prudence. This is important because there’s a real possibility of accidentally causing harm when interacting with emerging powers.

We think it’s also important that you’re interested in trying to help all people equally and identifying the most effective ways to help, aiming to have well-calibrated judgements that are justified with evidence and reason. We’ve found these attitudes are quite rare, especially in foreign policy, which is often focused on national interest.

How to tell if you’re on track

Only a few people we know have ever tried really gaining this skill, so we’re not quite sure what success looks like.

It’s worth asking “how strong is my performance in my job?” for whatever you are doing to build this skill. Don’t just ask yourself — you’ll get the best information by talking to the people you work with or the people who you think are excellent at understanding the emerging power you’re focusing on.

Hopefully, after 1–2 years, you will have:

• Started building a strong network in the country you’re learning about
• Learned something substantially important and impressive, like knowing a language to (almost) fluency
• Found a fairly stable job relevant to the emerging power you’re learning about where you’re rapidly able to learn more (like one of the things we list below)
• Built up knowledge of a global problem that you can combine with your experience of the emerging power to have an impact later

How to get started building experience with an emerging power

Broadly, the aim is to get a useful combination of the following as quickly as possible:

1. Knowledge of the intersection of an emerging power and an important global problem, such as the topics listed below
2. Knowledge of and connections with the community working on the pressing global problems you want to help tackle
3. A general understanding of the language and culture of an emerging power, which probably requires spending at least a year living in the country. (Though again, having a background in China or Russia — and possibly even just visiting — could exclude you from some Western government jobs.)

Below is a list of specific career steps you can take to gain the above knowledge. Most people should pursue a combination depending on their existing expertise and personal fit.

For many people, the best option at the start of your career won’t be any of the steps in this section. Instead, you could take a step towards building a different skill that you’ll use in conjunction with experience of an emerging power — even if that initial step has absolutely nothing to do with an emerging power.

This option has significant flexibility, since it would be easy to switch into another career if you decide not to focus on an emerging power.

To learn more, we’d particularly highlight our articles on how to get started building:

• Research skills
• Policy and political skills
• Communicating ideas
• Organisation-building skills

We’d guess that these are the most relevant skills to combine with experience of an emerging power, but we’re not sure — for more, see all our articles on skills.

But if you’re ready to start building this skill in particular, here are some ways to do it.

Go to the country and learn the language

If you’re a fluent English speaker, it takes around six months of full-time study to learn a Western European language. For other languages — like Chinese — this time might be more like 18 months.⁸ (Learning to write Chinese can take much longer and isn’t clearly worth it.)

You can learn most effectively by living in the country and aiming to speak the language 100% of the time.

We’ve written about learning Chinese in China in more detail.

We’re not sure how valuable it would be to learn other languages common in emerging powers, like Hindi, Russian, or Portuguese. In general, it’ll depend on the ease of learning the language and the prevalence of English in the country you’re focusing on — especially among decision makers.

Teaching English in an emerging power

What’s the easiest job for someone smart but lazy? The top answer to this question on Quora claims that it’s teaching English in China.

The huge demand for English teachers means that this option is open to most native English college graduates. These positions typically pay $15,000–$30,000 per year, include accommodation, and might only require four hours of work per day. For instance, you get a monthly salary of $2,100–2,800 per month during a typical one-year program offered by First Leap. Job benefits include work visa sponsorship arrangement, flight to China, and a settling-in allowance of up to $1,500. Another program, Teach in China, offers $900–1,800 per month in compensation, but also provides rent-free housing and can be pursued for just one semester. This is more than enough to live in a small Chinese city. You can earn even more if you do private tutoring as well, although the Chinese government is currently clamping down on the private tutoring industry.

It’s harder to get paid positions teaching in India without previous teaching experience.

This option won’t get you equally useful skills and connections as the other options in this list, but you will be able to learn about a culture and study a language at the same time. However, doing this through a prestigious fellowship — such as the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Programme — could mitigate this downside.

Build connections with people working on top problems

If you are a citizen of an emerging power, then we’d guess the best first step would be to get involved in the community of people working on the world’s most pressing problems and ideally volunteer or intern with some organisations working on these risks, like those on our list of recommended organisations.

If you have connections and trust with other altruistically-minded people, you can help them learn about China and help coordinate their efforts.

With that in mind, we’d also recommend getting involved with the effective altruism community, where there are lots of people working on the kinds of global problems that this skill is relevant for.

Work in top companies or a foreign office of a top Western company

Working at any high-performance company — such as a top startup — is a generally great initial step to build career capital. And if that company is based in an emerging power, you’ll get to learn about the country at the same time. For example, you could look at startups that have been funded by top Chinese venture capitalists, such as HongShan Capital, IDG Capital, and Hillhouse Capital. One VC even told us that they’d provide job recommendations if asked, as they often know which of their companies are best-performing. Read more about startup jobs.

You don’t need a technical background to work at a startup: there are often roles available in areas like product management, business development, operations, and marketing.

In general, the aim would be to learn about an emerging power, gain useful experience, and make relevant connections — rather than push any particular agenda or otherwise try to have an impact right away.

Another advantage of this option is that you could follow it into earning to give. In some countries (like China), charities, research, and scholarships can often only be funded by citizens of that country, which could make earning to give a more attractive option if you are a citizen.

You could also aim to work at an office of a top Western consultancy, finance firm, or professional services firm in the country you’re learning about. This offers many of the standard benefits of this path — namely a prestigious credential, flexibility, and general professional development — while also letting you learn about an emerging power. We’ve heard some claims that your career might advance faster if you start in London or New York, but this advantage seems to be shrinking due to the increasing opportunities and importance of emerging powers. However, the accessibility of these jobs can be precarious and highly dependent on your nationality — for example, China is increasingly cracking down on foreign consultancies. Another consideration is that salaries are generally lower in emerging powers, even at international firms (with the exception of Hong Kong).

Do relevant graduate study

Which subjects?

If you want to work on issues around future technology, then it might be better to study something like synthetic biology or machine learning, and then increase your focus on an emerging power later.

Alternatively, you could start studying economics, international relations, and security studies, with a focus on a particular emerging power. Ideally, you could also focus on issues like emerging technologies, conflict, and international coordination. See ideas for high-impact research within China studies.

It’s also useful to have a general knowledge of the language, history, and politics of the emerging power you’re studying. So another way to get started might be to pursue area or language studies (one source of support available for US students is the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program), perhaps alongside one of the topics listed above.

All of these subjects are useful, so we’d recommend putting significant weight on personal fit in choosing between them. Some will also better keep your options open, such as economics and machine learning. See our general advice on choosing graduate programmes.

Should you study in the country you’re gaining experience with?

Once you’ve chosen a programme that’s a good fit, we think it’s generally best to aim to go to the highest-ranked university possible — whether that’s in the West or the country you’re studying — rather than specifically aiming to study in a foreign country. It’s probably more useful to gain an impressive credential than spend time living in the country since there are many other ways to do that.

An alternative is to look for a joint programme, such as — in the case of China — the dual degree offered by Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University. John Hopkins is highly ranked for policy master’s degrees, so this course combines a good credential with the opportunity to study in China.

You might also consider the Schwarzman Scholars programme — a one-year, fully-funded master’s programme at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Approximately 20% of all US students studying in China are on this programme.

If you don’t yet have many connections with the effective altruism community and want to get involved, then you could also use graduate study as an opportunity to gain these connections by being based in one of the main hubs, including the San Francisco Bay Area, London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Boston.

If you’re a Chinese citizen interested in studying in the West, you might want to consider that:

• The Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford has about four scholars per year from mainland China and one from Hong Kong.
• The China Oxford Scholarship offers up to 20 scholarship places to students from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau to pursue postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford.

Work as a foreign journalist

If you’re proficient in a foreign language, you could try becoming a foreign correspondent in the country you’re gaining experience with. It could help if you have a related degree from a top university (e.g. China studies or international relations with a focus on East Asia).

English-language news agencies such as Reuters, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Bloomberg maintain large bureaus across the world (including in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong) and often hire younger journalists.

Most major international publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times also have a small but significant presence in many major world cities where you can apply for internships. A fresh graduate should expect to intern for about six months before finding a full-time position.

If you’re focused on China and coming from the West, it is often easier to find work at China-based English-language publications where you can do original journalism, such as the South China Morning Post (which has a graduate scheme), Caixin Media, or Sixth Tone. We do not recommend working for Chinese state media, as there will be few opportunities to create original content and most work will likely be polishing articles translated from English.

We also don’t recommend directly writing about effective altruism in China because we think it’s particularly easy to cause harm.

Work in philanthropy in an emerging power

If you’re interested in doing good in an emerging power, it helps to understand attitudes about doing good in that country. One way to do that is to learn about philanthropy. You could also aim to make connections with philanthropists in an emerging power — this comes with the added benefit of building a network of (often wealthy) do-gooders.

One career option here is to work at research institutions dedicated to the topic of philanthropy. For example, in China, these include:

• China Global Philanthropy Institute, which was established in Shenzhen by five prominent Chinese and American philanthropists: Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, Niu Gensheng, He Qiaonyu, and Ye Qingjun. The institute organises training programmes such as the Global Philanthropy Leaders Program for China’s High Net Worth Individuals
• Institute for Philanthropy at Tsinghua University, which aims to be a leading institute for research on philanthropy and become a top national think tank in China. It has conducted research for Giving Pledge
• China Philanthropy Research Institute at Beijing Normal University
• Harvard Ash Center: China Philanthropy Project

You could also find a list of other philanthropy research centres from the Global Chinese Philanthropy Initiative.

There are also Western foundations that work in emerging powers. The Berggruen Institute, Ford Foundation, and Gates Foundation all work in China.

To explore this, you could attend relevant conferences. For instance, if you’re a social entrepreneur interested in China, you could attend a Nexus Global Youth Summit in the region. It’s a network that brings together young philanthropists and social entrepreneurs. If you would like to learn more about the latest developments in Chinese philanthropy, you could attend the International Symposium on Global Chinese Philanthropy by the Global Chinese Philanthropy Initiative, and the Chinese and Chinese American Philanthropy Summit by Asia Society in Hong Kong.

Before pursuing these options, it might be useful to first learn about best practices in Western philanthropy, perhaps by taking any role (even a junior one) at Open Philanthropy, GiveWell, or other strategic philanthropy organisations.

What other knowledge should you gain to have an impact?

We think the most pressing global problems often relate to global catastrophic risks and emerging technology — though there are many other important issues you could work on, like factory farming.

Once you’ve chosen a particular emerging power, you can gain expertise in the following topics. These are all vital issues to understand in the West as well, but the intersection of these issues with China (and other emerging powers) is particularly neglected.

AI safety and strategy

Safely managing the development of transformative AI may require unprecedented international coordination, and it won’t be possible to achieve this without an understanding of global emerging powers and coordination with organisations in these countries. This means understanding issues like:

• What is the state of AI development in the emerging power you’re learning about?⁹
• What attitudes do technical experts in the emerging power have towards AI safety and their social responsibility? Who is most influential?
• How does the government of the emerging power shape its technology policy? What attitudes does it have towards AI safety and regulation in particular?
• What actions are likely to be taken by the government and companies in the emerging power concerning AI safety?

(Read more about AI strategy and policy, and about China-related AI safety and governance paths.)

Biorisk

Global coordination is also necessary to reduce biorisk. This means understanding issues like:

• What is the state of synthetic biology research in the emerging power you’re learning about?¹⁰
• What attitudes do biology researchers in the emerging power have towards safety and social responsibility?
• How does government technology policy in the emerging power relate to the risks from this technology?

International coordination and foreign policy

Expertise on any of the following issues (among others) could be highly useful:

• How, when, and why does the emerging power you’re learning about provide public goods globally?
• If you’re focusing on China, what do its foreign non-government organisation laws and domestic charity laws mean for its international collaboration on global causes?
• What are the emerging power’s foreign policy priorities, and how is it likely to handle the possibility of global catastrophic risks?
• How can coordination between the West and the emerging power you’re focusing on be increased and the chance of conflict be decreased?
• How should Western government policy concerning catastrophic risks relate to policy in the emerging power?

Other global problems

Many of the key organisations working to reduce factory farming are expanding rapidly into China, India, and Brazil, so expertise in these countries and factory farming is also useful.

Knowledge of China seems less important within global health and development than in many of the other global problems we focus on. This is because China is not as important a player in international aid and global health. It also seems easier to find people who are already experts on the intersection of China and development policy than with the topics listed above. We’d guess a knowledge of India would be more relevant to global health and development.

Once you have this skill, how can you best apply it to have an impact?

In general, having an impact with this skill involves three steps — not necessarily in this order:

1. Choosing 1–3 top problems to focus on. It’s possible you’ll want to do something highly problem-specific (like doing AI research in an emerging power), but it’s also possible you’ll want to do something more broadly applicable (like working as a journalist). Either way, the problem you work on is a substantial driver of your impact, so it helps to have 1–3 top problems in mind.
2. Building a complementary skill, such as research, communicating ideas, organisation-building, or policy and political skills. Most ways of having an impact are going to involve applying your experience with an emerging power using one of these other skills.
3. Find a job that uses your complementary skill in a way that’s highly relevant to the emerging power you have experience with. Decide between jobs depending on your personal fit. If you can’t find one of those jobs, try to get a job that continues building your skills. For example, there might be a great policy job available that has nothing to do with emerging powers — and you can always switch back later in your career.

With that in mind, we’d recommend reading the relevant article for your complementary skill — these articles also contain ideas on having an impact using that skill. Depending on your personal fit, those ideas could be higher impact than the specific suggestions in this article.

Also, many of the options in the section above on how to get started could easily become impactful as you gain experience, for example:

• Working in top foreign companies
• Working as a foreign journalist
• Working in philanthropy

Below we list some additional options that are harder to enter without a few years building up your skills.

Work in an AI lab in safety or policy

If you’re a citizen of an emerging power, especially China, you could try working for an AI lab in that country. The lab could be commercial or academic.

You could try to get a role working in technical safety research, and, in the long run, you could aim to progress to a senior position and promote increased interest in and implementation of AI safety measures internally.

You could also try working as a governance or policy advisor at a top AI lab — this could be a lab based in the emerging power or a role at a western AI lab focused on emerging power dynamics.

It’s possible that other roles in labs could be good for building AI-related career capital — but many such roles could be harmful. (For more, read our career review of working at leading AI labs.)

To learn more, read our career review of China-related AI safety and governance paths.

Work at a think tank

You could work at a Western think tank, studying issues specifically relevant to pressing problems in the emerging power you’re focusing on. Some think tanks focus more on the most relevant topics than others. For instance, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Center for a New American Security, Centre for the Governance of AI, Brookings Institution, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace seem relevant for issues related to existential risks. (There are doubtless others we’re not aware of.) One risk is that it can be much more difficult to work on China-Western coordination if you’ve had a job at a think tank that’s generally seen as particularly anti-China.

Beyond that, it could also be useful to work on anything concerning international coordination and foreign policy, such as the US-China Relations Independent Task Force of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. Another option is to work at a joint partnership institution, such as Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy by applying to their Young Ambassadors Program in Beijing.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to enter roles in Chinese think tanks if you’re not a Chinese citizen, and this may also be the case in other emerging powers (we’re not sure).

If you are a Chinese citizen, you could aim to work in a top Chinese think tank. You could look to work at a think tank doing AI-related work or look more broadly at think tanks such as the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

You can read more about think tank roles in our separate career profile.

Work in roles focused on an emerging power in organisations focused on reducing existential risks

Many key organisations working on existential risks want to better understand China to inform their work. For instance, representatives of many AI risk research organisations we recommend have attended conferences in China.

These organisations struggle to find altruistically motivated people with deep knowledge of top problems as well as knowledge of China. They also struggle to find people connected to relevant Chinese experts. So you could use this skill set to aid organisations working on existential risks.

Academic research in an emerging power

Academic research could be a very high-impact career path, especially when the research is focused on a top problem, like biorisk research or technical AI safety research.

If you want that research to have an impact, your role as an academic could become closer to advocacy, using a communication skill set. For example, you could work on AI safety at a top Chinese university lab, which could be valuable both for making progress on technical safety problems and for encouraging interest in AI safety among other Chinese researchers — especially if you progress to take on teaching or supervisory responsibilities. (Read more.)

Other options

Advising parts of international organisations focused on AI, such as the UN Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation or the OECD’s AI Policy Observatory, could provide opportunities for impact.

In industry, it could be worth exploring opportunities in semiconductor or cloud computing companies in emerging powers, especially in China. This is based on our view that shaping the AI hardware landscape could be a high-impact career path.

You might also consider supporting the translation of materials related to pressing problems into the language of the emerging power, in particular reputable academic materials — although be aware that this can be easy to get wrong.

Finally, there are likely many other promising opportunities to apply this skill now and in the future that we don’t know about. After all, a notable thing about this skill is that it involves gaining knowledge that Western organisations — like 80,000 Hours — lack by default. So if you go down this route you may well discover novel opportunities to use it.

Find jobs that use experience with an emerging power

If you think you might be a good fit for this skill and you’re ready to start looking at job opportunities that are currently accepting applications, see our curated list of opportunities. You could filter by policy or location to find relevant roles.

View all opportunities

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use this skill

• China-related AI safety and governance paths
• Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks
• Specialist in emerging global powers

Learn more about building experience with an emerging power

Top recommendations

• Podcast: Jeffrey Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both
• AI safety, security, and stability among great powers by Andrew Imbrie and Elsa B. Kania
• For more recommendations, see Syllabus: artificial intelligence and China by Jeffrey Ding, Sophie-Charlotte Fischer, Brian Tse, and Chris Byrd

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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This logic doesn’t just apply to criminal justice. For almost any global issue you’re interested in, roles in powerful institutions like governments often offer unique and high-leverage ways to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Why are policy and political skills valuable?

We’ll argue that:

• Governments (and other powerful institutions) have a huge impact in the world in general.
• Powerful institutions are often important for finding solutions to the problems we think are most pressing.
• You can create change if you’re able to build the skills that will let you do so.
• You’ll need to use your influence well and avoid causing harm.

Together, this suggests that building the skills needed to get things done in large institutions could give you a lot of opportunities to have an impact.

Later, we’ll look at:

• How to evaluate your fit for building policy and political skills
• How to get started building policy and political skills
• How you can use these skills to have an impact once you’ve started

Governments (and other powerful institutions) have a huge impact in the world

National governments are hugely powerful.

For a start, they command the spending of huge sums of money. The US government’s federal budget is approximately $6.4 trillion/year — that’s approximately the annual revenue of the world’s 14 largest companies by revenue (although only around $1.7 trillion/year is discretionary spending). Many other Western countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

And it’s not just money. Governments produce laws governing the actions of millions — or billions — and have unique tools at their disposal, including taxation and tax breaks, regulation, antitrust actions, and, ultimately, the use of force.

The US spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military (although this is an outlier — in other Western countries it’s more like tens of billions).

Why does this scale matter?

Well, we’ll argue that your chances of reaching a government role in which you can have a large influence are probably high enough that in expectation you can have a significant impact, given the huge scale of government action.

And it’s not just governments. Most of the advice in this article can be applied to any powerful institution, such as an international body or organisation like the United Nations. Much of what we say even applies to jobs at large corporations.

Governments and other major institutions play a major role in addressing the world’s most pressing problems

National governments and international bodies — in particular the US, UK, and EU — are already working on some of the problems we have identified as most pressing. For example:

• Biorisk: The UK government released the UK Biological Security Strategy aimed at preventing future pandemics in June 2023. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) works on public health in the US and is also one of the most important organisations working on global disease control. The US defence and intelligence community also works in this area. For instance, the Department of Defense does a lot of work on infectious diseases and assists other countries’ efforts to prevent the proliferation of biological weapons.
• AI safety and public policy: In her annual State of the Union Address, the President of the European Commission told the European Parliament that the EU should be working to mitigate the risk of extinction from AI. The White House Office issued an executive order on AI, which — among other things — requires developers of the most powerful AI systems to develop safety standards and tests and share these results with the US government. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has a program on explainable AI, which is a component of AI safety research. The UK government has set up the AI Safety Institute. And as AI becomes more important, governments will likely become more involved.
• Nuclear security: The US has the world’s most powerful military and the second biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons. Federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the State Department are important for preventing nuclear catastrophe.

Governments also play a major role in pretty much every other global issue you can think of (including basically every issue we have have profiles on, such as global health, climate change, and factory farming).

Throughout this article, we focus on the US because we think it has particular influence in areas related to the problems we think are most pressing, and because it’s where we have the most readers. However, we think these skills are also valuable to build if you’re based in many other countries (and we also have advice specifically about the UK).

Beyond governments, there are also international organisations and large companies that are important for solving certain problems. For example, the Biological Weapons Convention plays a unique role in preventing biological catastrophes, while leading AI labs and large tech companies have a crucial influence over the development of AI.

To see lists of particularly relevant institutions for various problems, see our problem profiles and job board.

You can create change

You might think that, even if you work at an important institution, you won’t have much impact because you won’t really be able to affect anything. You’ll have to carry out the will of elected officials, who are bound to the electorate, institutional constraints, and special interests. And while this is definitely true in many cases, we do think there are opportunities to have at least a small effect on the actions of these large and powerful institutions.

Frances Kelsey was an academic and a pharmacologist. But, in 1960, she took a major career step when she was hired by the FDA. Just one month into her new career in government, she was given her first assignment to review a drug: thalidomide. Despite considerable pressure from the drug’s manufacturer, Kelsey insisted that it be tested more rigorously.

And so, while more than 10,000 children across the world were born with birth defects as a result of thalidomide — living with life-long deformed limbs and defective organs — only 17 such children were born in the US. Kelsey was hailed by the American public as a hero and was awarded the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962.¹

But why was a mid-level official — only one month into her new job — able to have such an impact?

First, there’s just a huge amount to do, and senior officials don’t have that much time.

For example, in the US, there are 535 members of Congress and around 4,000 presidential appointees in the executive branch. That might sound like a lot, but think about it this way: each of these people, on average, has oversight over about 0.02% of the US federal budget — over $1 billion. It would be literally impossible to micromanage that amount of activity.

This is only a very rough heuristic, but by dividing the $1.7 trillion discretionary federal budget by the number of people at different levels of seniority, we can estimate the average budget that different subsets of people in the government oversee.²

Note that this method is just an estimate of the average and there are some reasons to think it’s probably too high.³

Nevertheless, these figures are so high that if you can help those budgets be used just a little more efficiently, it could be worth millions of dollars of additional spending in the area of focus.

And, in other ways, this is an underestimate of the responsibility of each individual because much of what the government does is not best thought of as setting budgets — rather it comes from regulation, foreign policy, changing social norms and so on. Budgets here are just being used as a proxy for one form of impact.

Second, the views and opinions of others in government aren’t completely fixed. Otherwise — whether you think it’s protected free speech or a distortion of democracy — it’s hard to explain why private companies spend around $4 billion a year on federal lobbying. For every dollar spent by a profit-oriented company on lobbying, it’s probably getting more than a dollar back on average by affecting government policy. This suggests that people interested in social change can have an impact, especially if they’re focused on global issues with little other lobbying, or they can find neglected ways to affect policy.

And so it’s not surprising that when we’ve spoken to people working in and around governments, we’ve found that — as in the case of Frances Kelsey — people have actually had the opportunity to influence things even in junior roles (if they had the skills).

In the US, we spoke to a number of mid-level and senior federal employees, and most were able to give us an example of how they had a large positive impact through their role. Some of their examples involved starting new impactful programs worth $10s of millions, saving Americans $100s of millions, or moving billions to something potentially more impactful. We haven’t vetted these stories, but at the very least they persuaded us that mid-level and senior federal employees feel as though they can sometimes have a large positive influence on the government.

In the UK, one junior civil servant we spoke to determined how £250 million was spent in her policy area through careful discussions with senior civil servants, while ministers were only scrutinising larger chunks of money.

And it’s not just in the executive. For example, in the US Congress, huge amounts of work are done by congressional staffers. “Ninety-five percent of the nitty-gritty work of drafting bills and negotiating their final form is now done by staff,” according to former Senator Ted Kennedy.⁴

Often this work is done by very junior people. One junior staff member in a Congressional office told us that more senior individuals (like Chiefs of Staff) are often tasked with substantial managerial responsibilities that crowd out their ability to focus on nitty-gritty policy research. Because of this, they have to defer to more junior staff (such as legislative assistants) who have the capacity and time to dig into a specific policy area and make concrete proposals.

This all suggests that you can effect change in large institutions (even when you’re just getting started), and in particular:

• On issues where people care enough for changes to be made, but not enough to micromanage the changes
• Where powerful figures like elected officials have vague goals, but no specific idea of what they want
• When details have a large impact, e.g. the details of one piece of legislation can affect many other laws

All other things being equal, the more senior you are, the more influence you’ll have.

If you’re a motivated graduate from a top university, over the course of your career, the chance of reaching high levels in the government is significant.

Approximately 1 in 30 federal employees in DC are in the senior executive service. What’s more, we found that students with a strong academic background and great social skills (and an interest in politics) in the UK could have an around 1 in 3 chance of becoming an MP. Meanwhile, if you became a Congressional staffer in the US, you’d have something like a 1 in 40 chance of being elected to Congress.

Other factors will also affect your ability to create change, such as how politicised your area is (the more political, the more your moves will be countered by others).

All that said, many people we speak to in the civil service don’t feel that they have a lot of influence. That’s because many roles don’t have opportunities for a lot of impact. (We’ll discuss finding ones that do later, and it can be hard to see your impact even in those that do.)

But the potential for change is there. You can think of decision making in large institutions as a negotiation between different groups with power. Most of the time you won’t tip the balance, but occasionally you might be able to — and it could have a large impact.

But you’ll need to use your influence responsibly

Having influence is a double-edged sword.

If you use your position poorly, then you might make things worse than they would have been otherwise. This is especially easy in policy, because it’s hard to know what truly makes things better, and policy can have unintended consequences. This is especially disturbing if you end up working on critical problems, such as preventing pandemics or nuclear crises.

This doesn’t mean you should avoid these positions altogether. For a start, someone has to take these positions, and it’ll probably be better for the world if more altruistic people enter them. Hopefully, if you’re reading this article, you’re more likely than average to be one of these people.

However, it does mean that if you succeed in advancing you have a huge responsibility to use the position well — and the higher you advance, the more responsibility you have.

This means trying to do the best job you can to help the institution do more good for society, and being especially careful to avoid actions that could cause significant harm.

Unfortunately, the more you advance, the easier it is to lose touch with people who will give you frank feedback, and the more temptations you’ll face to do unethical or dishonest actions in order to preserve your influence or “for the greater good” — i.e. to get corrupted.

This means we’d especially encourage people considering this path to focus on building good character and making sure they have friends around them who can keep them honest at the early stages, so these are in place in case they gain a lot of influence.

It’s also important to make sure you have a clear ‘edge’ that will allow you to do more good than a typical employee. For instance, you might be able to give ministers more evidence-based advice, contribute specialist knowledge, or pay more attention to the effect of policies on the long-term future than typical.

That said, even talented and very well-meaning people can fail to do good in government and even do harm, so it is worth learning constantly and thinking carefully and critically about what will actually help. Read more advice on avoiding harm.

What does using a policy and political skill set involve?

Any career path that ends up in an influential institutional position could be a way of using these skills, though some options are more likely to be relevant to the problems we think are most pressing.

This typically involves the following steps:

1. Identify some institutions that could play an important role tackling some of the problems you think are most pressing. See an introduction to comparing global problems in terms of impact and lists of institutions that are important to each area in our problem profiles and job board.

2. Learn to make useful contributions to an institution (or group of institutions) by gaining experience, credibility, seniority, and authority.

3. Often, it involves developing a speciality that’s especially relevant to the problems you want to focus on. For instance, if you want to work on tackling engineered pandemics, you might specialise in counter-terrorism, technology policy, or biomedical policy. This is both to help you advance into more relevant roles, but also to improve your understanding of which policies are actually helpful. That said, many policy makers remain generalists. In that case, you need to make sure you find trusted expert advisors to help you understand which policy changes would be most helpful.

4. Move into roles that put you in a better position to help tackle these problems. Focusing on pandemics again, you might aim to work at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and then advance to more senior positions.

5. Have an impact by using your position and expertise to improve policies and practices relevant to pressing global problems or bringing attention to neglected but important priorities.

Within this skill set, it’s possible to focus more on policy research or policy implementation. The first is about developing ideas for new policies, and involves an element of applied research skills, while the second is a bit more like an organisation building skill set and has an impact via making an important institution more efficient.

There’s also a spectrum of roles from roles that are more like being a technical specialist to those — like roles in political parties or running for elected office — that are more political and closer to engagement with the general public and current affairs.

In addition to roles actually within the relevant institutions, there are also “influencer” roles which aim to shape these institutions from the outside.

This includes jobs in think tanks, advocacy non-profits, journalism, academia, and even corporations, rather than within government.

The skills needed for influencer roles are similar to those needed for policy and political roles in many ways, but they also overlap a lot with skills in research and communicating ideas. These roles can be a better fit for someone who wants to work in a smaller organisation, is less comfortable with political culture, or wants to focus more on ideas rather than application.

In practice, people often move between influencer and government positions across their careers.

Some people think that to work in policy you have to be brilliant at networking.

That’s not quite true — as we’ve seen, depending on your role, you might focus more on understanding and researching policies, communicating ideas to a specific audience, or just really understanding your particular institution very well.

But it’s nevertheless true that networking skills are more important in building a policy and political skill set than, for example, if you wanted to work in a purely research — and you can learn more about how to network in our article on how to be successful in any job. In particular, multiple people — both in the US and in the UK — have told us that it’s important to be friendly and nice to others.

Finally, we’d like to emphasise the potential value of doing policy-style work in industry, especially if you’re interested in AI policy. While government policy is likely to play a key role in coordinating various actors interested in reducing the risks from advanced AI, internal policy, compliance work, lobbying, and corporate governance within the largest AI labs are also powerful tools. Collaboration between labs and government also requires work that may use similar skills, like stakeholder management, policy design, and trust-building.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

This skill set is fairly broad, which also means it can potentially be a good fit for a wide variety of people. Don’t rule it out based on a hazy sense that government work isn’t for you!

For example, entering policy through building specific expertise can be a good fit for people interested in research careers but who would like to do something more practical. Many roles are totally unlike the stereotype of a politician endlessly shaking hands or what ‘government bureaucrat’ brings to mind.

How to predict your fit in advance

Here are some traits that seem likely to point towards being a great fit:

• You have the potential to succeed at relationship-building and fitting in. In many of these roles, you need to be able to develop good relationships with a wide range of people in a short amount of time, come across as competent and warm in your interactions, genuinely want to add value and help others achieve their goals, consistently follow up and stay in touch with people, and build a reputation and be remembered.

  It helps to have empathy and social intelligence so that you can model other people’s viewpoints and needs accurately. It also helps if you can remember small details about people! You don’t necessarily need all these skills when you start out, but you should be interested in improving them.

  These skills are most important in more public-facing party-political positions and are also needed to work in large institutions. However, there are also roles focused more on applying technical expertise to policy, which don’t require these skills as much (though they’re still probably more important than in e.g. academia).

• You can think of a relevant institution at which you can imagine yourself being relatively happy, productive, and motivated for a long time — while playing by the institution’s rules. Try speaking with later-career people at the institution to get as detailed a sense as possible of how long it will take to reach the kind of position you’re hoping for, what your day-to-day life will be like in the meantime, and what you will need to do to succeed.

• Having the right citizenship. There are lots of influential and important policy roles in every country, so you should consider them wherever you live. But some roles in the US seem especially impactful — as do certain roles at large institutions like the EU. In particular, any of the roles within the US most relevant to the problems we think are most pressing — particularly in the executive branch and Congress — are only open to, or at least will heavily favour, American citizens. All key national security roles that might be especially important will be restricted to those with US citizenship, which is required to obtain a security clearance.

  If you’re excited about US policy in particular and are curious about immigration pathways and types of policy work available to non-citizens, see this blog post. Consider also participating in the annual diversity visa lottery if you’re from an eligible country, as this is low-effort and allows you to win a US green card if you’re lucky (getting a green card is the only way to become a citizen).

• Being comfortable with political culture. The culture in politics, especially US federal politics, can be difficult to navigate. Some people we know have entered promising policy positions, but later felt like the culture was a terrible fit for them. Experts we’ve spoken to say that, in Washington, DC, there’s a big cultural focus on networking and internal bureaucratic politics to navigate. We’ve also been told that while merit matters to a degree in US government work, it is not the primary determinant of who is most successful. We’d expect this to be similar in other countries. People who think they wouldn’t feel able or comfortable to be in this kind of environment for the long term should consider whether other skills or institutions would be a better fit.

  That said, this does vary substantially by area and by role. Some roles, like working in a parliament or somewhere like the White House, are much more exposed to politics than others. Also, if you work on a hot button, highly partisan issue, you’re much more likely to be exposed to intense political dynamics than if you work on more niche, technocratic, or cross-party issues.

It’s useful if you can find ways to do cheap tests first, like speaking to someone in the area (which could take a couple of hours), or doing an internship (which could take a couple of months). But often, you’ll need to take a job in the area to tell whether this is a good fit for you — and be willing to switch after a year or more if it’s not. For more, read our article on finding a job that fits you.

How to tell if you’re on track

First, ask yourself “How quickly and impressively is my career advancing, by the standards of the institution I’m currently focused on?” People with more experience (and advancement) at the institution will often be able to help you get a clear idea of how this is going. (It’s also just generally important to have good enough relationships with some experienced people to get honest input from them — this is an additional indicator of whether you’re “on track” in most situations.)

One caveat to this is that the rate of advancement could really vary depending on the exact role you have in that institution. For example, in Congress, speed of promotion often has to do less with your abilities and more with timing and the turnover of the office. As a result, the better the office, the fewer people leave and the slower the pace of promotion; the opposite is often true for bad offices. So you need to make sure you’re judging yourself by relevant standards — again, people with more experience at the institution should be able to help here.

Another relevant question to ask is “How sustainable does this feel?” This question is relevant for all skills, but especially here — for government and policy roles, one of the main things that affects how well you advance is simply how long you can stick with it and how consistently you meet the institution’s explicit and implicit expectations. So, if you find you can enjoy government and political work, that’s a big sign you’re on track. Just being able to thrive in government work can be an extremely valuable comparative advantage.

One other way to advance your career in government, especially as it relates to a specific area of policy, is what some call “getting visibility” — that is, using your position to learn about the landscape and connect with the actors and institutions that affect the policy area you care about. You’ll want to be invited to meetings with other officials and agencies, be asked for input on decisions, and engage socially with others who work in the policy area. If you can establish yourself as a well-regarded expert on an important but neglected aspect of the issue, you’ll have a better shot at being included in key discussions and events.

How to get started building policy and political skills

There are two main ways you might get started:

1. Institution-first. You’d start your career by trying to find a set of institutions that are a good fit for you and that seems at least relevant to the problems you think are most pressing (e.g. the executive branch of the US government or tech companies). You’d then try to move up the ranks of those institutions.
2. Expertise-first. In this route, you initially focus on building a relevant speciality or area of expertise (e.g. in academia or think tanks) and then use that to switch into institutional positions later. In addition, people with impressive credentials and accomplishments outside of government (e.g. in business, consulting, or law) can sometimes enter important departments and agencies at particularly senior and influential levels.

If you take the institution-first approach, you can try for essentially any job at this institution and focus on performing well by the institution’s standards. All else being equal, it’d be better to work on jobs relevant to a pressing problem, but just trying to advance should probably be your main goal early in your career.

The best way to learn how to perform and advance is to speak to people a couple of steps ahead of you in the path. Also look at cases of people who advanced unusually quickly and try to unpack what they did.

Sometimes the best way to advance will involve going somewhere other than the institution itself temporarily. For instance, going to law school, public policy school, or working at think tanks can give you credentials and connections that open up positions in government later.

If you’re focused on developing expertise in a particular area of policy, then it’s common to go to graduate school in a subject relevant to that area (e.g. economics, machine learning, biology).

As always, whether these paths are a good way of building your skills depends on the specific job or programme and people you’ll be working with:

• Will you get good mentorship?
• What’s their reputation in the field?
• Do they have good character?
• Does their policy agenda seem positive?
• Will the culture be a good fit for you?

With all that in mind, here are a few next steps that are especially good for building these skills:

Fellowships and leadership schemes

Fellowships can be an effective way to gain experience inside government or think tanks and can help you advance quickly into more senior government positions.

Some fellowships are aimed at people who already have some professional experience outside of policy but want to pivot into government roles, while others are aimed at recent graduates.

In the US, consider the Presidential Management Fellows for recent graduates of advanced degrees, the Horizon Fellowship, the AAAS fellowship for people with science PhDs or engineering master’s, or the TechCongress fellowship for mid-career tech professionals. If you have completed a STEM graduate degree, also consider the Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship Program.

In the UK, try the Civil Service Fast Stream. And if you’re interested in EU AI policy, you can apply for the EU Tech Policy Fellowship. We also curate a list of UK / EU policy master’s options through our job board.

Graduate school

In general, we’d most recommend grad school for economics or machine learning. (Read more about why these are the best subjects to study at grad school.)

Some other useful subjects to highlight, given our list of pressing problems, include:

• Other applied quantitative subjects, like computer science, physics, and statistics
• Security studies, international relations, public policy, or law school, particularly for entering government and policy careers
• Subfields of biology relevant to pandemic prevention (like synthetic biology, mathematical biology, virology, immunology, pharmacology, or vaccinology)

Many master’s programmes offer specific coursework on public policy, science and society, security studies, international relations, and other topics. Having a graduate degree or law degree will give you a leg up for many positions.

In the US, a policy master’s, a law degree, or a PhD is particularly useful if you want to climb the federal bureaucracy. Choosing a graduate school near or close to DC is often a good idea, especially if you’re hoping to work part- or even full-time in public policy alongside graduate school.

While you’re studying (either at grad school or as an undergraduate), internships — for example in DC — are a promising route to evaluate your fit for policy work and to establish early career capital. Many academic institutions in the US offer a “Semester in DC” programme, which can let you explore placements of choice in Congress, federal agencies, or think tanks. The Virtual Student Federal Service (VSFS) also offers part-time, remote government internships.

Just bear in mind that graduate schools present the risk that you could spend a long time there without learning much about the actual career you’re pursuing itself or the problem you want to work on. It may sometimes make sense to try out a junior role or internship, see how it feels, and make sure you’re expecting a graduate degree to be worth it before going for it.

Read more about going to grad school.

Working for a politician or on a political campaign

Working for a politician as a researcher or staffer (e.g. as a parliamentary researcher in the UK, legislative staff for a Member of Congress, or as campaign staff for an electoral candidate) can be one useful step into political and policy positions. It’s also demanding, prestigious (especially in the US, less so in the UK), and gives you lots of connections. From this step, it’s also common to move into the executive branch or to later run for office. Read more in our career review on becoming a congressional staffer.

You don’t strictly need a master’s or other advanced degree to work in the US Congress. But many staffers still eventually pursue a graduate degree, in part because federal agencies and think tanks commonly care more about formal credentials, and many congressional staffers at some point switch to these institutions.

You can also work for a politician on a particular campaign — some of the top people who work on winning campaigns eventually get high-impact positions in the federal government. This is a high-risk strategy: it often only pays off if your candidate wins, and even then, not everybody on the campaign staff will get influential jobs or jobs in the areas they care about, especially if you’re a junior campaign staffer. (Running for office yourself involves a similar high-risk, high-reward dynamic.)

Roles in the executive branch

Look for entry-level roles in your national government, again focusing on positions at the executive-branch equivalent or those most relevant to policy-making.

In the US, you could take an entry-level role as a federal employee, ideally working on something relevant to a problem you want to help solve or will give you the flexibility to potentially work on multiple pressing problems. The most influential positions are usually in the executive branch.

That said, most people have told us that, in the US, it’s even better to get a graduate degree first because it will allow you to reach higher levels of career advancement and seniority more quickly. A graduate degree could also qualify you for fellowships.

In the UK, see our profile on civil service careers.

Think tank roles

Think tanks are organisations that aren’t part of government but still focus on informing and ultimately influencing policymaking.

Research roles at policy think tanks involve conducting in-depth research on specific policy areas and formulating relevant recommendations. These researchers also often collaborate with experts, host events, engage with policymakers, and liaise with the media to influence and inform public policy discourse. This often involves fundraising, grant writing, and staying updated on political trends — and it can teach you many of the skills that are useful in government.

These roles are relatively competitive and you may have your reputation tied to particular institutions you work for — which can have upsides and downsides.

Think tanks also employ non-research staff in communications, HR, finance, and other areas; these roles are less likely to meaningfully impact policy outcomes, though they could still be a reasonable way to build policy career capital.

Also, think tank staff are often fairly cleanly split between entry-level employees and senior employees with advanced degrees (often PhDs), with relatively few mid-level roles. For this reason, it’s fairly uncommon for people to stay and rise through the ranks at a think tank without leaving for graduate school or another role.

These roles let you learn about important policy issues and can open up many options in policy. One option is to continue working in think tanks or other influencer positions, perhaps specialising in an area of policy. Otherwise, it’s common to switch from think tanks to the executive branch, a campaign, or other policy positions.

(Read more in our career review on working in think tanks.)

Other options

It’s also common to enter policy and government jobs from consulting and law, as well as other professional services, public relations, and business in general.

More broadly, having organisation-building skills (e.g. public relations, organisational communications, finance, and accounting knowledge) or research skills can help you find policy and political roles.

Find jobs that use policy and political skills

If you think you might be a good fit for this skill set and you’re ready to start looking at job opportunities that are currently accepting applications, see our curated list of opportunities.

View all opportunities

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

Let’s suppose you now have a position with some ability to get things done in an important institution, and, from building expertise or an advisory network in particular pressing problems, you also have some ideas about the most important things you’d like to see happen. Then what should you do?

Depending on the issue and your position, you might then seek to have an impact via:

1. Improving the implementation of policy relevant to a pressing problem. For example, you could work at an agency regulating synthetic biology.

2. Gathering support for policy ideas. For example, you could highlight the top areas of consensus in the field about promising ways the government could reduce global poverty to a politician you work for.

3. Coming up with ideas for new policies. For example, you might craft new proposals for implementing compute governance policies.

Improving the implementation of policies

When people think about political careers, they usually think of people in suits having long debates about what to do.

But fundamentally, a policy is only an idea. For an idea to have an impact, someone actually has to carry it out.

The difference between the same policy carried out badly vs. competently can be enormous. For instance, during COVID-19, some governments reacted much faster than others, saving the lives of thousands of citizens.

What’s more, many policies are by necessity, only defined vaguely. For instance, a set of drug safety standards might need to show there is “reasonable evidence” a drug is safe, but — as shown by Frances Kelsey — how that is interpreted is left up to the relevant agency and may even change over time.

Many details are often left undecided when the policy is created, and again, these get filled out by government employees.

This option especially requires skills like people and project management, planning, coordination in and out of government, communication, resource allocation, training, and more.

So, if you can become great at one or more of these things (and really know your way around the institution you work in), it’s worth trying to identify large projects that might help solve the problems you think are most pressing — and then helping them run better.

These roles are most commonly found in the executive branch such as the Defense Department, the State Department, intelligence agencies, or the White House. (See also our profile on the UK civil service.)

Bringing ideas for new policies to the attention of important decision makers

One way to have an impact is to help get issues “on the agenda” by getting the attention and buy-in of important people.

For example, when politicians take office, they often enter on a platform of promises made to their constituents and their supporters about which policy agendas they want to pursue. They can be, to varying degrees, problem-specific — for example, having a broad remit of “improving health care.” Or, it could be more solution-specific — for example, aiming to create a single-payer health system or remove red tape facing critical industries. These agendas are formed through public discussion, media narratives, internal party politics, deliberative debate, interest group advocacy, and other forms of input. Using any of these ways to get something on the agenda is a great way to help make sure it happens.

You can contribute to this process in political advisory positions (e.g. being a staffer for a congressperson) or through influencer positions, such as think tanks.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re working within an institution (such as a large corporation or a government department), you want to be as senior as possible while still being responsible for a specific set of issues. In such a position, you’ll be in contact with all the key stakeholders, from the most senior people to those more on your level.

But it’s important to remember that, for many important issues, policymakers or officials at various levels of government can also prioritise solving certain problems or enacting specific proposals that aren’t the subject of national debate. In fact, sometimes making issues too salient, framing them in divisive ways, or allowing partisanship and political polarisation to shape the discussion, can make it harder to successfully get things done.

Coming up with ideas for new policies

In many areas relevant to particularly pressing problems, there’s a lack of concrete policies that are ready to implement.

Policy creation is a long process, often starting from broad intellectual ideas, which are iteratively developed into more practical proposals by think tanks, civil servants, political parties, advocates, and others, and then adjusted in response to their reception by peers, the media and the electorate, as well as political reality at the time.

Once concrete policy options are on the table, they must be put through the relevant decision-making process and negotiations. In countries with strong judicial review like the US, special attention often has to be paid to make sure laws and regulations will hold up under the scrutiny of the courts.

All this means there are many ways to contribute to policy creation in roles ranging from academia to government employees.

Many policy details are only hashed out at the later stages by civil servants and political advisors. This also means there isn’t a bright line between policy creation and policy implementation — more a spectrum that blurs from one into the other.

In the corporate context, internal policy creation can serve similar functions. Though they may be less enforceable unless backed up with contracts, the norms policies create can shape behaviour considerably.

While policy research is the bread and butter of think tank work, many staffers in Congress, agencies, and the White House also develop policy ideas or translate existing ideas into concrete policy proposals. For many areas of technical policy, especially AI policy, some of the best policy research is being done at industry labs, like OpenAI and DeepMind. (Read more about whether you should take a job at a top AI lab.)

For more details on the complex work of policy creation, we recommend Thomas Kalil’s article Policy Entrepreneurship in the White House: Getting Things Done in Large Organisations.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use these skills

• AI governance and coordination
• Biorisk research, strategy, and policy
• Policy careers focused on other pressing global issues
• Non-technical roles in leading AI labs
• Research and advocacy promoting impactful climate solutions
• Congressional staffer
• Economics PhDs
• Law school in the US
• Working at a leading AI lab
• Party politics in the UK
• UK civil service jobs
• US policy master’s degrees

Learn more about government and policy

• The entire emerging tech policy careers site
• Working in US AI policy
• Podcast: Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it
• Podcast: Tom Kalil on how to have a big impact in government & huge organisations, based on 16 years’ experience in the White House
• Podcast: Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider
• Collection of work on ‘Should you should focus on the EU if you’re interested in AI governance for longtermist/x-risk reasons?’ on the Effective Altruism Forum

See all our materials on policy and political careers.

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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