Bohlin came up with one very simple invention: the modern seat belt.

Within a year, Volvo began equipping their cars with seat belts as standard, and — as a result of its importance to safety — opened up the patent so that other manufacturers could do the same. Volvo claims that Bohlin’s invention has saved over a million lives. That would make Bohlin one of the highest-impact people in history, alongside David Nalin, the inventor of oral rehydration therapy for diarrhoea.

We’d guess Bohlin’s impact wasn’t quite that large. For one thing, seat belts already existed: in 1951, a Y-shaped three-point seat belt was patented that avoided the risks of internal injuries from simple lap belts. Bohlin’s innovation was doing this with just one strap, making it simple and convenient to use. For another thing, it seems likely that someone else would have come up with Bohlin’s design eventually.

Nevertheless, a simple estimate suggests that Bohlin saved hundreds of lives at the very least² — incredible for such a simple piece of engineering.

Thanks to Jessica Wen and Sean Lawrence at High Impact Engineers for their help with this article. Much of the content is based on their website.

Why are engineering skills valuable?

Bohlin’s story shows that engineering — by which we mean all kinds of engineering other than software engineering, which we cover separately — can clearly be hugely valuable for the world. But we think it’s most valuable when:

• You can really speed up development. This might be because you’re working on something that’s relatively neglected by others, or because you’re working in an area where you have high personal fit, so you can make particularly helpful contributions (or, ideally, both).
• You’re producing something which will practically be used to help people. One reason Bohlin had such a large impact — and Griswold, the inventor of the Y-shaped three-point seat belt didn’t — is that Volvo opened up the patent for use by other manufacturers.
• You’re working on a particularly pressing problem. For example, vaccines for common and deadly diseases — like malaria — are much more useful for the world than vaccines for rare diseases.

Ultimately, many of the potential solutions to the top problems we recommend working on include developing and deploying technology — and this often requires engineers.

Below, we look more closely at how engineering could be used to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Jobs in engineering are often highly paid and in-demand. So learning engineering skills can give you great back-up options, and — depending on the specific discipline — can be a decent choice for earning to give.

Good pay combined with intellectually rewarding work means that engineers often have high job satisfaction (although we’d expect job satisfaction to be lower in academia than in industry).

Finally, it’s worth noting that it’s possible to accidentally cause harm through engineering. While we’re generally hugely in favour of technological development, many of the risks we’re most concerned about arise directly from the development of future technologies. Many technologies are dual use and could have both positive and negative applications. So it’s worth thinking carefully about the work you’re doing and whether it could be used to cause harm. (For an example of how you might think about this, see this article on whether it’s good to work on advancing AI capabilities. This example primarily applies to software engineers, but could also apply more broadly — to computer hardware engineers for instance.)

What specific discipline of engineering is most valuable?

There are many different types of engineering. Typically, you’ll eventually specialise in one (often during an undergraduate degree).

There are ways of using any engineering discipline to have an impact.

That said, we’re most excited about:

• Biomedical engineering
• Chemical engineering
• Electrical and electronic engineering.

That’s because these areas are most relevant to some of our top problems, in particular preventing catastrophic pandemics and reducing the risk of an AI-related catastrophe.

Some engineering disciplines also pay much better than others. In particular, nuclear, aerospace, petroleum and computer hardware engineers are paid best (although we wouldn’t generally recommend becoming a petroleum engineer, as we’d worry it causes harm), while agricultural and civil engineers are paid least.

What does using an engineering skill set typically involve?

An engineering skill set usually involves developing technologies faster and deploying existing technologies in novel ways. (This is in contrast with research skills, which focus on finding answers to unanswered questions, although there’s a fair bit of overlap between the two.)

Engineers typically do one of the following:

• Work in academia
• Work in industry
• Work at small startups (or found them)

Work in academia

Work in academia tends to focus on more speculative, early-stage technology (e.g. using ultraviolet light to sterilise rooms). This work is much more similar to research, so if you’re interested we’d suggest looking at our articles on research skills and working in academia. This route almost always involves getting a PhD in a subfield of engineering.

Academic research can be difficult for many people. It often involves long deadlines, self-driven work, and very little structure. Beyond engineering, academic work is also likely to include grant applications, teaching courses, publishing papers, mentoring students, and other responsibilities.

(We’ll look more at what to consider when choosing to do a PhD below.)

Work in industry or startups

As the technology becomes more viable, businesses tend to get involved — either startups or large engineering firms, or both. There are also some nonprofits focused on high-impact technology.

When working on engineering in industry, you can choose to become a subject matter expert (more similar to research) or instead become a manager, increasing the scope of your responsibilities. Either way, you can try learning faster by getting temporary placements in other parts of a company, taking part in engineering competitions, or working towards professional registration (which can be a helpful credential for engineering careers).

Generally, the work you focus on will be dictated by the business needs of the company, and, compared to academia, you’re more likely to have a standard 9-5 workday (rather than more flexible hours). Deadlines are often much shorter than in academia.

If you choose to become a manager or work for a small startup, you’ll be using organisation-building skills alongside your engineering skill set.

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

You’ll need a quantitative background, and ideally you’ll have studied (or plan to study) engineering or a highly related subject at undergraduate level.

If you’re considering doing an engineering degree (or otherwise moving your career into engineering), signs you’d be a great fit could include:

• You’re comfortable working on scientific subjects.
• You’re good at practical, hands-on work: in many areas of engineering, you’ll end up working with physical objects in a lab.
• You enjoy understanding how and why physical things work.
• You enjoy fixing or building things, for example, around your home.
• You are good at “systems thinking”: for example, you’d notice when people ask you similar questions multiple times and then think about how to prevent the issue from coming up again.
• You might also be good at learning quickly and have high attention to detail.

With academic engineering, you’ll need to be comfortable with the academic research environment and generally happy to be self-motivated while working on things with few clear deadlines. If you’re doing a degree, you could try doing some sort of academic research (like a summer research project) and think about how that goes. (Read more about evaluating your fit for research.)

If you want to become a manager or work for a startup, you’ll probably need more social skills (including things like clear communication and people management skills).

Assessing your fit for different disciplines of engineering

One way to start is to think about which of the natural sciences you most enjoy learning about. Some examples:

Another way to determine what kind of engineering you might be good at is to figure out where you lie on the spectrum from scientist to engineer. If you enjoy the more theoretical, abstract, or precise side of physics or mathematics, then something like materials science or electrical engineering could be a better fit. If you lean more towards optimisation, application of knowledge, or practicalities, then civil or chemical engineering might be more interesting. If you are somewhere in the middle, then mechanical engineering could be for you.

However, don’t place too much weight on these crude tests — all these areas involve design testing and innovation, as well as research and studying new phenomena.

Your discipline also may not matter that much when it comes to getting a job. For example, many larger companies will hire graduate engineers from a range of different disciplines for the same role, relying on on-the-job training for specialisation.

How to tell if you’re on track

Within industry, the stages here look like an organisation-building career, and you can also assess your fit by looking at your rate of progression through the organisation.

Within academia, there’s generally very defined progression (e.g. completing a PhD, getting a postdoc, etc.).

In both cases, it’s worth trying to find some engineers whose work you respect, and who you trust to be honest with you, to give you feedback on how you’re getting along.

How to get started building engineering skills

Getting an engineering degree

The main way to get started is to do an undergraduate degree in engineering — although if you have a different quantitative degree, you may well be able to get an engineering job. (Read our advice on how to spend your time while at college.)

Engineering degrees are usually in a particular discipline of engineering. However, it can often be fairly easy to switch between engineering courses at university if you find that you’re not enjoying one kind of engineering.

Some universities may offer a ‘general first year’ for engineering in which you can take classes from different engineering disciplines to get a feel for what you enjoy.

Universities may have a range of student clubs or teams that work together to design, fabricate, test, and operate a complex vehicle or device in a national or worldwide competition with other universities. Examples include Formula SAE, the University Rover Challenge, UAS challenge, rocketry competitions (e.g. Australian Universities Rocket Competition), and human-powered vehicle challenges.

These sorts of competitions teach important skills that are invaluable in an engineering career — but they do typically require a large time commitment. Employers often view participation in these sorts of student teams very favourably, so it can give you a leg up in getting a job after graduating.

If you can, do internships in industry. Most large engineering companies run summer internships, and they are a good opportunity to see how industry works and gain some career capital. You could also do an engineering research project over the summer with a research group or join a startup. If all else fails, using the summer to create something also gives you valuable skills and experience — plus it lets you test out how much you like it.

Going into academia

If you want to do engineering in academia, you probably need to do a PhD.

Many people find PhDs very difficult. They can be isolating and frustrating, and take a very long time (4–6 years). What’s more, both your quality of life and the amount you’ll learn will depend on your supervisor — and it can be really difficult to figure out in advance whether you’re making a good choice.

So, if you’re considering doing a PhD, here are some things to consider:

• The topic of your research: It’s easy to let yourself be tied down to a PhD topic you’re not confident in. If the PhD you’re considering would let you work on something that seems relevant to a pressing problem you want to work on, it’s probably — all else equal — better for your career, and the research itself might have a positive impact as well.
• Mentorship: What are the supervisors or managers like at the opportunities open to you? You might be able to find engineering roles in industry where you could learn much more than you would in a PhD — or vice versa. When picking a supervisor, try reaching out to the current or former students of a prospective supervisor to ask them some frank questions. You can also use your final year undergraduate research project to evaluate your fit with a supervisor. (Also, see this article on how to choose a PhD supervisor.)
  Your fit for the work environment: Doing a PhD could mean working on your own with very little supervision or feedback for long periods of time. Some people thrive in these conditions! But some people really don’t and find PhDs extremely difficult.

PhD competitiveness varies by field. To get into any PhD, you’ll probably need high undergraduate grades and some research experience — including a reference from one or more professors. More competitive PhDs might require you to have published papers or extremely strong references. To get those, you might need to spend 1–3 years as a research assistant before applying for PhDs.

Entering industry

You can likely use an undergraduate degree to get an entry-level position in anything ranging from large engineering companies to startups.

In some countries (like the UK), large engineering companies offer graduate programs where you do rotations in different teams in the company. These allow you to build up lots of different skills and knowledge quickly (your ability to choose your rotation depends on the company, the department, and your manager).

Large companies are also likely to have a structured professional development scheme with training, assigned mentors, and regular check-ins to set you up for professional registration as an engineer.

Joining a startup generally means that you have a lot of responsibilities very quickly and less structure around you. This might mean more freedom with what you can do and lots of variety. You might learn a ton, but you won’t get much feedback or mentorship, and there will also be more stress and uncertainty.

Find jobs that use engineering

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:

View all opportunities

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

Having a big impact as an engineer means finding a particularly pressing global issue and finding a way to use engineering to develop solutions.

Below is a list of pressing global problems and how engineers can help with each.

If you’re already an engineer, you can read through to see if any of these issues appeal to you — and then aim to speak to some people in each area about how your skills could be applied and what the current opportunities are.

You could also apply to speak to our team or get in touch with High Impact Engineers.

Preventing catastrophic pandemics

A future pandemic that is much worse than COVID-19 could pose a significant risk to society.

There’s a key role for bioengineers and chemical engineers to play in mitigating these risks, including:

• Developing vaccine platform technologies to help us rapidly produce new vaccines in response to novel threats
• Developing and implementing metagenomic sequencing to improve our ability to detect new pandemics

Other engineering disciplines are also needed. For example, engineers could:

• Help design better pathogen containment systems for labs and systems to reduce pathogen spread in buildings or vehicles. (There are roles here for materials, civil, industrial, aerospace, and HVAC engineers, among others.)
• Help improve stockpiling and management of PPE (personal protective equipment), such as gloves and masks. (There are possibly roles here for industrial engineers.)
• Help improve technologies for monitoring pathogens, like systems for sampling environments and processes for managing and examining samples. (There are roles here for industrial, mechanical, and automation engineers, among others.)

To learn more, take a look at Biosecurity needs engineers by Will Bradshaw and this overview of using engineering in biosecurity from High Impact Engineers.

AI alignment

We expect AI hardware to be a crucial component of the development of AI. Given the importance of positively shaping the development of AI, experts in AI hardware could be in a position to have a substantive positive impact.

Useful disciplines include:

• Electrical, electronic, and computer engineering (probably the most relevant discipline for AI hardware)
• Materials engineering with a focus on semiconductors
• Industrial engineering with a focus on the semiconductor supply chain

To learn more, read our full career review on becoming an expert in AI hardware.

If you have hardware expertise, you might also consider moving into AI policy. Read our career review of AI governance and coordination to learn more.

Improving civilisational resilience

One very neglected potential way to reduce existential threats is through generally increasing the resilience of our society to catastrophes.

All kinds of engineers can play a big role in this issue — for example by developing alternative foods, refuges, and knowledge stores that will be able to survive a near-apocalypse.

For instance, David Denkenberger is an engineer developing alternative foods that could be rapidly scaled up in the event of a global famine, perhaps caused by nuclear winter or a major volcanic eruption. We have two podcasts with him:

• Using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe
• We could feed all eight billion people through a nuclear winter

To learn more about refuges, see this review by Open Philanthropy. Or learn about how to increase the chance of recovery from a catastrophic event in two of our podcast episodes:

• Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all
• Paul Christiano on whether we should leave messages for future civilisations

Fight climate change

We think further developing and rolling out green energy is one of the best ways to tackle climate change, and engineers have a major role to play in this. This includes not just generating more green electricity, but also things like ensuring that there is enough electricity to meet seasonal changes in electricity demand and trying to find ways to make other forms of energy greener (like replacing fossil fuel use in blast furnaces or transportation).

You can further increase your impact by focusing on technology that’s either not widely known (e.g. hot rock geothermal) or unsexy (e.g. decarbonising cement rather than developing electric cars).

We have more notes on how to most effectively tackle climate change. We’d also recommend What can a technologist do about climate change? by Bret Victor.

Other problem areas that need engineers

In addition to the top problems mentioned above, there are many other pressing areas where engineers are needed. For example, you could:

• Create alternative proteins through chemical engineering to help reduce meat consumption and prevent the suffering of animals in factory farms.
• Work on tech and logistics for global health, like producing and rolling out vaccines for polio and malaria.
• Try to develop products for people living in poverty — see more about why that can be impactful in our interview with SendWave.

Options outside engineering that can use engineering aptitude

Engineers often have a systems mindset that can make them a particularly good fit for operations management or entrepreneurship. If that work interests you, it’s worth considering whether to spend some time building the skills you’d need to make the transition.

Some engineers may also excel at other options that require good quantitative abilities, such as:

• Working on AI safety technical research
• Software engineering
• Earning to give in a high-paying role, such as quantitative trading

Engineers may be able to easily develop skills in translating technically complex topics to less technical audiences, such as policymakers, which means you could also consider building a policy skill set. For example, TechCongress aims to get engineers, and other technologists, involved as technical advisors for policymakers.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use engineering skills

• Expert in AI hardware
• Impactful climate solutions
• Biomedical research

Learn more about engineering

• High Impact Engineers
• Will Bradshaw on why biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists
• A list of potential projects in biosecurity

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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In a nutshell:

You can start building software and tech skills by trying out learning to code, and then doing some programming projects before applying for jobs. You can apply (as well as continue to develop) your software and tech skills by specialising in a related area, such as technical AI safety research, software engineering, or information security. You can also earn to give, and this in-demand skill set has great backup options.

Why are software and tech skills valuable?

By “software and tech” skills we basically mean what your grandma would call “being good at computers.”

When investigating the world’s most pressing problems, we’ve found that in many cases there are software-related bottlenecks.

For example, machine learning (ML) engineering is a core skill needed to contribute to AI safety technical research. Experts in information security are crucial to reducing the risks of engineered pandemics, as well as other risks. And software engineers are often needed by nonprofits, whether they’re working on reducing poverty or mitigating the risks of climate change.

Also, having skills in this area means you’ll likely be highly paid, offering excellent options to earn to give.

Moreover, basic programming skills can be extremely useful whatever you end up doing. You’ll find ways to automate tasks or analyse data throughout your career.

What does a career using software and tech skills involve?

A career using these skills typically involves three steps:

1. Learn to code with a university course or self-study and then find positions where you can get great mentorship. (Read more about how to get started.)
2. Optionally, specialise in a particular area, for example, by building skills in machine learning or information security.
3. Apply your skills to helping solve a pressing global problem. (Read more about how to have an impact with software and tech.)

There’s no general answer about when to switch from a focus on learning to a focus on impact. Once you have some basic programming skills, you should look for positions that both further improve your skills and have an impact, and then decide based on which specific opportunities seem best at the time.

Software and tech skills can also be helpful in other, less directly-related career paths, like being an expert in AI hardware (for which you’ll also need a specialist knowledge skill set) or founding a tech startup (for which you’ll also need an organisation-building skill set). Being good with computers is also often part of the skills required for quantitative trading.

Programming also tends to come in handy in a wide variety of situations and jobs; there will be other great career paths that will use these skills that we haven’t written about.

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

Some indications you’ll be a great fit include:

• The ability to break down problems into logical parts and generate and test hypotheses
• Willingness to try out many different solutions
• High attention to detail
• Broadly good quantitative skills

The best way to gauge your fit is just to try out programming.

It seems likely that some software engineers are significantly better than average — and we’d guess this is also true for other technical roles using software. In particular, these very best software engineers are often people who spend huge amounts of time practicing. This means that if you enjoy coding enough to want to do it both as a job and in your spare time, you are likely to be a good fit.

How to tell if you’re on track

If you’re at university or in a bootcamp, it’s especially easy to tell if you’re on track. Good signs are that you’re succeeding at your assigned projects or getting good marks. An especially good sign is that you’re progressing faster than many of your peers.

In general, a great indicator of your success is that the people you work with most closely are enthusiastic about you and your work, especially if those people are themselves impressive!

If you’re building these skills at an organisation, signs you’re on track might include:

• You get job offers 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.
• After some time, you’re becoming someone in your team who people look to solve their problems, and people want you to teach them how to do things.
• You’re building things that others are able to use successfully without your input.
• 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).

How to get started building software and tech skills

Independently learning to code

As a complete beginner, you can write a Python program in less than 20 minutes that reminds you to take a break every two hours.

A great way to learn the very basics is by working through a free beginner course like Automate the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Seigart.

Once you know the fundamentals, you could try taking an intro to computer science or intro to programming course. If you’re not at university, there are plenty of courses online, such as:

• Udacity’s Intro to Theoretical Computer Science
• MIT’s Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
• Stanford’s Programming Methodology

Don’t be discouraged if your code doesn’t work the first time — that’s what normally happens when people code!

A great next step is to try out doing a project with other people. This lets you test out writing programs in a team and working with larger codebases. It’s easy to come up with programming projects to do with friends — you can see some examples here.

Once you have some more experience, contributing to open-source projects in particular lets you work with very large existing codebases.

Attending a coding bootcamp

We’ve advised many people who managed to get junior software engineer jobs in less than a year by going to a bootcamp.

Coding bootcamps are focused on taking people with little knowledge of programming to as highly paid a job as possible within a couple of months. This is a great entry route if you don’t already have much background, though some claim the long-term prospects are not as good as if you studied at university or in a particularly thorough way independently because you lack a deep understanding of computer science. Course Report is a great guide to choosing a bootcamp. Be careful to avoid low-quality bootcamps. To find out more, read our interview with an App Academy instructor.

Studying at university

Studying computer science at university (or another subject involving lots of programming) is a great option because it allows you to learn to code in an especially structured way and while the opportunity cost of your time is lower.

It will also give you a better theoretical understanding of computing than a bootcamp (which can be useful for getting the most highly-paid and intellectually interesting jobs), a good network, some prestige, and a better understanding of lower-level languages like C. Having a computer science degree also makes it easier to get a US work visa if you’re not from the US.

Doing internships

If you can find internships, ideally at the sorts of organisations you might want to work for to build your skills (like big tech companies or startups), you’ll gain practical experience and the key skills you wouldn’t otherwise pick up from academic degrees (e.g. using version control systems and powerful text editors). Take a look at our our list of companies with software and machine learning internships.

AI-assisted coding

As you’re getting started, it’s probably worth thinking about how developments in AI are going to affect programming in the future — and getting used to AI-assisted coding.

We’d recommend trying out using GitHub CoPilot, which writes code for you based on your comments. Cursor is a popular AI-assisted code editor based on VSCode.

You can also just ask AI chat assistants for help. ChatGPT is particularly helpful (although only if you use the paid version).

We think it’s reasonably likely that many software and tech jobs in the future will be heavily based on using tools like these.

Building a specialty

Depending on how you’re going to use software and tech skills, it may be useful to build up your skills in a particular area. Here’s how to get started in a few relevant areas:

Depending on how you’re aiming to have an impact with these skills (see the next section), you may also need to develop other skills. We’ve written about some other relevant skill sets:

• How to get started building research skills
• How to get started building specialist knowledge relevant to a pressing problem
• How to get started building skills for communicating ideas

For more, see our full list of impactful skills.

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. The first step is to make an initial assessment of which problems you think are most pressing (even if you change your mind over time, you’ll need to decide where to start working).

Once you’ve done that, the next step is to identify the highest-potential ways to use software and tech skills to help solve your top problems.

There are five broad categories here:

• Use software and tech skills in research. Lots of technical research relevant to the world’s most pressing problems makes heavy use of software and tech skills — most notably, AI safety technical research. To be successful, you might also need a research skill set, which we’ve written about separately. For some paths, you’ll also need specialist knowledge in an area related to a pressing problem — e.g. hardware for becoming an expert in AI hardware.
• ML engineering for AI safety research. Most AI safety researchers work closely with engineers (and in many organisations, no clear distinction is made). This is a particularly high-impact way of using software and tech skills because we think risks from AI is one of the world’s most pressing problems.
• Build software for organisations working on pressing problems. Most organisations working on everything from global health to reducing the risk of nuclear war need software engineers to manage computer systems, apps, and websites. The key feature that draws this work together is that you’ll be building a product for others to use. Read more about software engineering careers and organisation-building skills.
• Protect sensitive information. Some organisations need help protecting information that could be hugely dangerous if it was known more widely, such as harmful genetic sequences or powerful AI technology. Breaches in areas like these could have disastrous consequences — which makes information security a great option for people who want to have a high-impact career. Read more about information security.
• Earn to give. Most jobs that use software and tech skills, whether software engineering, information security, data science, or something else entirely, command high salaries (particularly in the US) — and so they offer a great option for earning to give. Skilled software engineers can earn $300,000 a year or more at big tech companies. Probably the highest-paying routes are trading in quantitative hedge funds or founding a tech startup.

While some of these options (like protecting dangerous information) will require building up some more specialised skills, being a great programmer will let you move around most of these categories relatively easily, and the earning to give options means you’ll always have a pretty good backup plan.

Find jobs that use software and tech skills

See our curated list of job opportunities for this path.

View all opportunities

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use these skills

• AI safety technical research
• Information security in high-impact areas
• Expert in AI hardware
• Forecasting and related research and implementation
• Data collection for AI alignment
• Software engineering
• Found a tech startup
• Earning to give in quantitative trading
• Machine learning PhDs
• Early-stage startup employee
• Working at a leading AI lab
• Computer science PhD
• Data science
• Product manager in tech
• Web designer

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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Many highly specific areas of knowledge seem applicable to solving the world’s most pressing problems, especially risks posed by biotechnology and artificial intelligence.

In particular we’d highlight:

• Subfields of biology relevant to pandemic prevention. Working on many of the possible technical solutions to reduce the risk of pandemics will require expertise in parts of biology. We’d particularly highlight synthetic biology, mathematical biology, virology, immunology, pharmacology, and vaccinology. This expertise can also be helpful for pursuing a biorisk-focused policy career. (Read more about careers to prevent catastrophic pandemics.)
• AI hardware. Specialised hardware is a crucial input to the development of frontier AI systems. As a result, we expect expertise in AI hardware to become increasingly important to the governance of AI systems. (Read more about becoming an expert in AI hardware).
• Economics. Understanding economics can be valuable in a huge range of impactful roles when combined with another skill set. For example, economics research is crucial for conducting global priorities research and improving decision making in large institutions. And a knowledge of economics can also support you in building policy and political skills, particularly for policy design and governance research.
• Other areas we sometimes recommend include history, knowledge of China, and law.

Of course, whatever skill set you focus on, you’ll likely need to build some specialist knowledge — for example, if you focus on policy and political skills, you’ll need to gain specialist knowledge in the area of policy you’re working in. Similarly, if you build software and tech skills, you could consider gaining specialist knowledge in machine learning or information security. The idea of the above list is just to highlight areas we think seem particularly valuable that you might not otherwise consider learning about.

How should you get started building specialist knowledge?

Each area is very different, so it’s hard to give any specific advice that applies to all of them.

Besides the articles on specific areas linked above, we’d suggest checking out:

• Whether to go to grad school
• How to find a career that fits you best
• How to be more successful in any job, especially the sections on learning how to learn and how to master a field and make creative contributions

All our career reviews relevant to building specialist knowledge

• Biorisk research, strategy, and policy
• Expert in AI hardware
• Investigate a potentially pressing but unexplored global issue
• Data collection for AI alignment
• Engineering
• Economics PhDs
• Law school in the US

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 Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Take Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, sparking a protest which led to a Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. Parks was a seamstress in her day job, but in her spare time she was involved with the civil rights movement. When Parks sat down on that bus, she wasn’t acting completely spontaneously: just a few months before she’d been attending workshops on effective communication and civil disobedience, and the resulting boycott was carefully planned by Parks and the local NAACP. After she was arrested, they used widely distributed fliers to launch a total boycott of buses in a city with 40,000 African Americans, while simultaneously pushing forward with legal action. This led to major progress for civil rights.

There are many ways to communicate ideas. One is social advocacy, like Rosa Parks. Another is more like being an individual public intellectual, who can either specialise in a mass audience (like Carl Sagan), or a particular niche (like Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist who wrote about global health). Or you can learn skills in marketing and public relations and then work as part of a team or organisation to spread important ideas.

Why are communication skills valuable?

In the 20th century, smallpox killed around 400 million people — far more than died in all the century’s wars and political famines.

Although credit for the elimination of smallpox often goes to D.A. Henderson (who directly oversaw the programme), it was Viktor Zhdanov who lobbied the World Health Organization to start the elimination campaign in the first place — while facing significant opposition from the members of the World Health Assembly (the proposal passed by just two votes). Without his communication skills, smallpox’s elimination probably would not have happened until much later, costing millions of lives, and possibly not at all.

So why has communicating important ideas sometimes been so effective?

First, communicating ideas is a way to have an impact on a large scale. Ideas can spread quickly, so communicating ideas is a way for a small group of people to have a large effect on a problem. Ideas can also stick around once they’re out there, meaning your impact persists.

If you can mobilise two people to support an issue, that’s potentially twice as impactful as working on it yourself.

Technology has magnified these effects even further. More than ever before, normal people can launch a social movement, lobby a government, start a campaign that influences public opinion, or just persuade their friends to take up a cause. When successful, these efforts can have a lasting impact on a problem that goes far beyond what the communicators could have achieved directly.

Second, spreading ideas that are important for society in a concerted, strategic way is neglected. This is because there’s usually no commercial incentive to spread socially important ideas. Moreover, the ideas that are most impactful to spread are those that aren’t yet widely accepted. Standing up to the status quo is uncomfortable, and it can take decades for opinion to shift. This means there’s also little personal incentive to stand up for them.

Third, communicating ideas is an area where the most successful efforts do far more than the typical efforts. The most successful communicators influence millions of people, while others might struggle to persuade more than a few friends. This means that it’s a high-risk strategy in the sense that your efforts might very well come to nothing. But it’s also high reward, and if you’re an especially good fit for communicating ideas, it might well be the best thing you can do. (Read about why we think more people should dream big if they want to do good.)

We think there are many high-leverage opportunities to use communications skills to help address the global problems we’re focused on today.

The problems we highlight are unusually neglected, so often few people work on them or even know they’re problems. This means that simply telling people about these problems (and effective solutions to them) can be high impact by increasing the number of talented people who might want to help. (Indeed, that’s part of our own strategy for impact!)

More specifically, communicators can help do things like:

• Encourage the consideration of ideas about the way AI might shape this century.
• Put concern for nuclear security back onto the political agenda.
• Spread important values, like moral concern for nonhuman animals and distant future generations.
• Mobilise efforts to prevent a pandemic much worse than COVID-19.
• Stand up for technology agnosticism to tackle climate change, especially for approaches that are unfairly unpopular (e.g. nuclear energy) or unknown (e.g. hot rock geothermal) or unsexy (e.g. decarbonising the cement industry rather than electric cars).
• Spread the ideas of effective altruism, as well as adjacent ideas like improving judgement and decision making (as in the example of Julia Galef below).
• Provide AI researchers and policymakers with the understanding required to successfully navigate the challenge of AI alignment.

Spreading important ideas like those above might not only have immediate benefits in terms of getting more people to work on these issues — it also helps to advance society’s understanding of these ideas, moving the discourse forward, making important ideas more mainstream, and eventually shaping policy and social norms.

You can see more information on the best solutions to the global problems we focus on in our problem profiles.

Another advantage of learning these skills is that they can be applied to almost any pressing problem. Almost all organisations have some need for marketing, public relations, and other external communications, and almost all problem areas have ideas that would be useful to spread. This gives you a lot of future flexibility.

Moreover, although some versions of this skill set are mainly useful in the social sector and for having an impact (e.g. how to run a direct action campaign), there are skills in this area that are highly paid and make you generally employable, such as marketing, sales, or public relations. Similarly, building an audience as an individual communicator often opens up a wide range of future career opportunities within your audience. So, learning these skills can give you backup options if you decide to step back from doing good for a while or earn to give.

A word of warning: it seems fairly easy to accidentally do harm if you promote mistaken ideas, promote good ideas in a way that turns people off (e.g. by being sensationalistic or dishonest), or draw people’s attention away from even more important issues. So, be careful about communicating ideas without much input from others, and, if you’re building communication skills, you may also need to build especially good judgement about which ideas to communicate and how to best communicate them.

What does building communication skills typically involve?

Content creation skills

One path we recommend to readers is to become a content creator. This often includes:

• Journalism
• Social media content creator
• Writing books
• Public intellectual

Less often among our readers it might involve:

• Film/TV/documentary director
• TV or Radio presenter
• Actor or musician

You’ll want to focus on the medium that’s the best fit for you, with the goal of building the most valuable audience you can for spreading important ideas.

Content creation careers often involve the following steps:

1. Honing your craft. Typically, a content creation career starts with learning your medium and then learning how to communicate effectively with a certain target audience (usually starting small, like with Twitter or a blog).

   Being really prolific helps a lot. If you’re able to make loads of different videos, or write 100 articles to pitch to various media outlets, that will substantially increase your chances of success. So if you’re blogging once a month and it’s not working out, see if there’s a way you could write a lot more.

2. Building an audience. If you’re working in a large organisation — for example, as a journalist — the idea is to build career capital so you can move somewhere that has a large audience.

   If you’re pursuing a career where you work more individually — for example, as a social media influencer or writing books — you’ll need to build an audience yourself. To do this, create lots of material to develop an audience to grow your future impact.
   You can probably jump around between working in large organisations and working individually — focus on finding opportunities where you’ll learn the most.

   In this stage, you shouldn’t necessarily be focusing on impact right away, but rather anything that builds your reach and credibility. Lots of digital platforms provide high-quality data that you can use to get rapid feedback on your content — so you can, for example, A/B test strategies.

   Bear in mind, the goal is not just to reach the largest number of people possible — it can be more impactful to have a niche but influential audience. You want to aim to build the biggest impact-adjusted audience you can.

   Credibility also often requires expertise, so you might also want to use this time to build that expertise by learning about the ideas you think are most important. (One great way of doing that — while practising your content creation skills — is learning by writing.)

3. Promoting the most important ideas. Once you have an audience, you can increasingly focus on figuring out how to use it to have the most impact. This usually involves thinking carefully about which ideas are (i) important (i.e. impactful if people know and act on them), (ii) neglected (i.e. not well known by your target audience already), and (iii) relevant or interesting to your audience, so that they’re more likely to be inspired to help with them.

The specific skills, qualifications, and approaches you’ll need to build will depend on the audience you’re trying to influence. If you’re aiming to communicate ideas to ~100 policymakers who specialise in a certain topic (like Viktor Zhdanov), the strategies you’ll use will be very different from someone aiming to communicate to the population in general (like Rosa Parks).

Some example approaches:

• Subject matter expert: trying to become known for being the point person on a particular topic — works best for more technical or niche audiences
• Translation: taking expert positions and making them accessible to a larger audience (e.g. science journalists, nonfiction authors) — sometimes works best for niche audiences (such as when translating technical research for policymakers) and other times works best for wider audiences
• Mass-media presenter: speaking to a large, mainstream audience (e.g. TV personalities, many journalists) — works best for creating mass buy-in for ideas

We’ve worked with some readers who have succeeded as individual creators, but it’s important to bear in mind many of these options are seen as glamorous, which makes them competitive.

For instance, a recent poll found that the most desired career path among Gen Z is Youtuber. And less than 1% of YouTube channels have over 100,000 subscribers.

If you enter one of the more competitive areas, like film, the competitive pressure can often mean you have to spend a large fraction of your career creating the most commercially viable and popular content rather than focusing on the most important ideas.

While we’ve worked with several readers who have become journalists, these other paths are often seen as glamorous careers, which makes them very competitive — so we typically recommend them less often.

However, if you think you might be able to succeed at getting to the top of one of these paths (and especially if you’re already on track), it’s often worth continuing. After getting established, it’s often possible to then devote, say, 20% of your time to projects that you think are socially valuable. You’ll also likely gain connections with many others who have large audiences, helping you spread important ideas indirectly.

Organisational communication skills

Another option is to learn skills like the following, and then work as part of an organisation or team who are spreading important ideas:

• Marketing
• Public relations
• Sales and negotiation
• Social advocacy and campaigning
• Visual design
• Copywriting and editing
• TV/film/radio production
• Publishing

The structure of these careers are similar to those focused on organisation-building skills, so see that profile for more specific advice on getting started and evaluating your fit. If you’re focusing on a niche audience of policymakers, then this skill set also blurs into the “policy influencer” roles covered under policy and political skills.

Briefly, you’ll want to start by working with a team who are outstanding at these kinds of skills.

That might involve joining a team that’s already working on an important problem, but it’s more common to first work at an organisation that doesn’t have much positive impact but can offer you mentorship and feedback. For example, you could learn digital marketing by working at a top startup or agency.

Once you have skills to offer, two options include:

• Find a job with a team who are spreading important ideas. This could look like working at an advocacy nonprofit, joining a political campaign, or being head of public relations for an author.
• Join an impactful organisation and work on their communications, public relations, or marketing strategies.

Communicating ideas alongside another job

Some jobs make communicating ideas their central focus, such as those we listed right above.

But it’s also possible to learn to spread ideas well in any job by:

• Being a sensible advocate for good ideas in conversation and refining your views over time
• Engaging with and recommending articles, books, podcasts, and the like to family, friends, colleagues, and others in your circles
• Posting ideas and articles on social media

You can also communicate ideas as a side project. For example:

• Run a podcast, blog, or Twitter feed with a significant following.
• If you’re an academic, do media appearances or write books aimed at a popular audience part time (i.e. be a ‘public intellectual’).
• Run a meetup, like an effective altruism group, and create materials for it (e.g. talks).

It’s possible to build skills for communicating ideas while you’re in a normal, stable job which gives you space to pursue projects like these on the side (although, if you want this to become your core skill set, we’d generally recommend eventually making building these skills your primary career focus, which can be hard to do if it’s a side project).

The careers that put you in the best position to spread important ideas (and learn to do so effectively) are those that let you:

• Build a platform (e.g. anything that makes you well known in your field)
• Get influential connections (e.g. working in government or policy)
• Gain credibility (e.g. being a respected academic)

Being super successful at anything that’s slightly public facing (for example, roles in academic research, or in government, or founding a business) can also put you in a good position to spread important ideas, even if communicating ideas isn’t a core part of the role. If Ariana Grande came to us for career advice, we wouldn’t recommend she quit music and become an AI safety researcher. Rather, we’d discuss how she might use her platform to spread important ideas that might appeal to her fans.

We haven’t worked with Ariana, but we have worked with an Olympic tennis player, Marcus Daniell. He decided to use his position — and especially his connections — to set up High Impact Athletes, which encourages professional athletes to pledge a fraction of any prize money they win to high-impact charities.

Communication also doesn’t need to be through nonfiction. For example, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality popularised ideas about the importance of agency and how common biases affect our ability to make good decisions (though using fiction to get across important ideas without manipulation is a rare skill).

Community building

Communication careers are defined by their focus on spreading ideas on a big scale, but it’s also possible to have a similar impact on a more person-to-person level as a community builder.

Some community building involves running events and organising others — similar to organisation-building roles. But at its core is the specific skill of building connections with others.

Community building often works well as a part-time position. For instance, Kuhan was a student at Stanford when they came across 80,000 Hours, and realised the importance of reducing existential risks. However, they also saw there were no organisations on campus focusing on that idea. So they founded the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, which runs courses and conferences about the topic to build a community of students aiming to work on these risks.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

Some signs that you’re a good fit for building skills for communicating ideas include:

• You find it relatively easy to develop content in some medium. For example, you might find it very easy to write — whether that’s marketing copy or academic reports or popular articles. Similarly, you might find it fairly easy to make videos. Bear in mind that almost everyone finds writing and other creative work difficult. If you’ve found in your life that you can do this for a few hours a day and actually finish some work, you’re doing well.
• People tend to think you communicate clearly in that medium.
• You consume lots of content in your medium — for example, if you want to be a writer, you often spend all day reading blogs or articles.
• You are verbally fluent and have good social skills — but there are many exceptions. For example, someone can be nerdy and awkward but make an amazing blogger.
• You might need some basic quantitative skills — at least enough to be able to understand data about your work.
• You feel like you’ll be motivated by people seeing the work you’ve produced.

If you’re doing something like public relations in an organisation, then the advice in our organisation-building skill profile may also be applicable.

How to tell if you’re on track

Once you’ve started exploring communicating ideas, you’ll want to ask yourself: “How generally successful am I by the standards of the communication track I’m on?”

For instance, if you’re trying to become a journalist, are you on track to land a job after several years of trying?

Check our career reviews to see if we have a career profile covering the specific pathway you’re interested in. (Though we regret we haven’t yet written profiles on many of the common media careers.)

If you’re focusing on content creation work, some good signs that you’re on the right track are:

• You’re producing lots of content.
• You get good feedback on your content, relative to people who have spent a similar amount of time on it (don’t forget that most public communicators have honed their craft for years, often long before they were famous).
• You find it easy to connect with your target audience (through at least one medium) and convince at least some of them of new ideas.
• You’re starting to build a following or career capital that might lead to a following in the future.

It’s hard to generalise about what levels of following are ‘good’ at different stages. Here are some extremely rough guides for what might be promising after 2–4 years for different media:

• You’re often able to get 100,000 views per video on YouTube or 100,000 likes per video on TikTok.
• You have a podcast with over 1,000 subscribers, and a typical episode you release gets 3,000 downloads (though podcasts are especially hard to launch if you don’t already have an audience).
• As a blogger, you have a newsletter or Substack with over 5,000 subscribers.
• You have 10,000 followers on Twitter.
• If you’re aiming to get published in mainstream media outlets, you have had content in more than two major publications (e.g. The Guardian, Vox).

As a reminder: you don’t necessarily need to be writing about important issues at the early stages — what matters is that you will bring in more of these issues in the future.

How to get started building communication skills

You can start building a communication skill set by studying anything — or doing any job — that will let you practice writing, public speaking, or creating any other type of content.

If you’re not able to do communication in your main work responsibilities, you can practice with independent work on the side, such as blogging, tweeting, media, podcasting, tiktoking, etc. It can even be possible to write a book alongside another job. (Though for anyone doing independent public work, make sure you avoid publishing something unintentionally offensive, as this could affect your career prospects for a long time, even if the offence is the result of a misunderstanding.)

Having a portfolio of content can help you if you want to get into most communications roles, including ones at large organisations (like marketing or PR).

Content creation skills

For aspiring writers, we recommend getting into the habit of writing regularly — ideally every day (even if it’s only a few hundred words) — and posting your writing publicly on Facebook, Twitter, or a blog.

For spoken content, you should practise in any ways you can — for example, give presentations in your professional area, join your local Toastmasters group, make video blogs, or start a podcast.

Whatever your chosen medium or platform, try to create something regularly, and then actively try to learn from what you’ve done — think carefully about measurable goals you might want to achieve, and see whether and why you meet them.

What content should you produce?

Content that’s great can achieve far more reach and impact than content that’s merely good. People tend to produce much higher quality content when they’re naturally interested in a topic and working in a medium they genuinely like.

So we’d encourage you to look at examples of successful content, or find people doing what you want to do, then paying attention to where your intrinsic motivation leads you rather than just focusing on strategically selecting the ‘best’ topic or media type.

It can be worth doing some strategic thinking — for example, you might look at how the recommender algorithms work on various platforms and what kinds of content they are more likely to boost.

Which medium should you choose?

It may take some time to find the medium that’s the best fit for you. Someone might love long-form blog posts but hate Twitter; others find their niche in video, media appearances, and public talks. Experiment with different media to find the one that comes most naturally and is most motivating.

That said, as a secondary consideration, it can make sense to focus on media that are new and rapidly growing (it’s much easier to gain followers on new social media platforms than established ones) or are especially good for reaching a certain audience (e.g. HackerNews for the tech industry) and that fit your message (e.g. books and podcasts are better for complex ideas).

Finding your audience

To get started, you might ask yourself: “What’s a type of person that I understand and communicate well with, better than most people wanting to make a difference do?” If you’re a student, this might be fellow students. Or it could be others in your industry (e.g. biologists, policymakers). Or it could be a mass audience, like educated Americans. You might also pay attention to why it might be valuable to reach a certain audience.

Once you’re clearer on who your target audience is, your main aim should probably be to build your general ability to communicate with that audience. You might want to try to get any job that involves communicating with your chosen audience and allows you to get feedback on a regular basis — whether or not you’re producing content on topics directly related to pressing global problems.

If you’re interested in communicating with fairly general/widespread audiences, most jobs in journalism, and many in public relations and corporate communications, would be useful. If you’re focused on a more niche audience (e.g. AI scientists), then you might want to work somewhere where you can meet lots of people in that audience.

Once you’ve developed your skills and audience, then it’s time to focus more on having an impact, which we cover in the next section.

Organisational communication skills

The structure of these careers are similar to ones focused on organisation-building skills — you can get started by finding any role that will let you start learning one of these skills, like any role in marketing, editing, public relations, lobbying, visual design, or campaigning.

For communications roles at organisations, it can help to spend some time getting good at presenting yourself, for example by building a personal website with nice copy and good presentation. This lets you practise your skills as well as having something to show off to potential employers.

For more — including which organisations you should work for — take a look at how to get started building organisation-building skills.

Get funding

If you’d like to pursue this type of career, there is sometimes funding available. Some sources to consider include:

• The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund sometimes makes small grants that could help you transition into these types of careers. For instance, if you’d like to test out making YouTube videos about one of our recommended problems full time for three months, you could ask for $10,000; or if you’re interested in working in journalism but can’t earn enough money right away, you could ask for a salary top-up. They’re also interested in helping cover the costs of internships or graduate school.
• Longview Philanthropy funds media projects within effective altruism. For instance, it recently helped fund a $100,000 prize for new blogs.
• Open Philanthropy is interested in funding marketing related to effective altruism.

Apply for free one-on-one advising

Want more individualised advice before diving in? There’s a lot more to be said about:

• How to find the communication career that’s the best fit for you
• What strategy to take for getting started in communication careers
• How to best use your following if you already have one

Get in touch with our one-on-one team, and we may also be able to introduce you to people in these paths.

APPLY TO SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM

Find jobs that use communication skills

Filter our job board by ‘outreach’ to find jobs in this category:

View all opportunities

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

Once you have the skills and an audience, the question becomes which messages to focus on to have the biggest impact.

Some messages are more important to spread than others, but some messages are also easier to spread. You need to consider both factors and how their significance multiplies.

Moreover, you need to customise the analysis for your audience. The messages that are important and likely to spread among Ariana Grande fans are totally different from those likely to spread among philosophy academics.

Some key factors for comparing messages include the following (which is an adapted version of our problem framework):

1. Important — if this idea spread among your audience, how much impact would result?
2. Neglected — how widely known is this idea by your audience already? How much is it already discussed by other creators in your space?
3. Is it of interest to your audience? Or otherwise possible to get attention for given your platform? This makes it more likely to spread.
4. Is it personally interesting and motivating for you to work on?

The aim is to find messages or topics that do best on the multiple of all four factors.

Here’s a process you could go through to generate ideas:

1. Make a list of the global problems you think are most pressing.
2. Generate ideas for messages and ideas that could, if spread more widely among your audience, enable more progress on these problems. This could be calls to get more people working on these problems, information about the best solutions to them, or messages to help decision makers understand these issues better. To do this, explore the resources in our problem profiles and then speak to experts in the area about what would be helpful.
3. Think about which messages could be most of interest to your audience or a good fit for your platform.
4. Experiment with spreading those that seem most promising. It might take some trial and error to find an idea and framing that resonates with your audience. In particular, before taking on a big project like a book or documentary, try to test it out in a smaller version.

We listed a couple of examples of ideas we’d like to see spread above.

In practice, you’ll likely want to continue to publish a mixture of content that builds your audience or pays the bills and content that you think is especially impactful.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use these skills

• Academia
• Building effective altruism
• Party politics
• Journalism
• Public intellectual
• Working at an AI lab
• Non-technical roles at AI labs
• Think tank careers
• Work at a nonprofit that focuses on advocacy
• Non-technical role at an AI lab
• Organise an effective altruism local group
• Pursuing fame in arts and entertainment

Learn more

Our articles and podcasts:

• What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career? — interviews with Dylan Matthews, Derek Thompson, and Shaun Raviv
• Podcast: Kelsey Piper on room for important advocacy within journalism
• Podcast: Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most
• Podcast: Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
• How to be an effective advocate

See all our articles and episodes on advocacy careers

Some of the best resources we’ve found about individual communication:

• Messages to spread to help with the most important century
• Write Useful Books — one of the best guides we’ve read to writing good nonfiction
• The Priceonomics Content Marketing Handbook — a guide to writing shareable, data-driven online articles
• How to be popular on the internet by Tom Scott

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.

Continue →

The post Communicating ideas appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

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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The post Experience with an emerging power (especially China) appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

It might not sound like much, but as a result of Borlaug’s research, wheat production in India and Pakistan almost doubled between 1965 and 1970, and formerly famine-stricken countries across the world were suddenly able to produce enough food for their entire populations. These developments have been credited with saving up to a billion people from famine,¹ and in 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Many of the highest-impact people in history, whether well-known or completely obscure, have been researchers.

Why are research skills valuable?

Not everyone can be a Norman Borlaug, and not every discovery gets adopted. Nevertheless, we think research can often be one of the most valuable skill sets to build — if you’re a good fit.

We’ll argue that:

• Research seems to have been extremely high-impact historically
• There are good theoretical reasons to think that research will be high-impact
• Research skills seem extremely useful to the problems we think are most pressing
• If you’re a good fit, you can have much more impact than the average
• And, depending on which subject you focus on, you may have good backup options.

Together, this suggests that research skills could be particularly useful for having an impact.

Later, we’ll look at:

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

Research seems to have been extremely high-impact historically

If we think about what has most improved the modern world, much can be traced back to research: advances in medicine such as the development of vaccines against infectious diseases, developments in physics and chemistry that led to steam power and the industrial revolution, and the invention of the modern computer, an idea which was first proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper On Computable Numbers.²

Many of these ideas were discovered by a relatively small number of researchers — but they changed all of society. This suggests that these researchers may have had particularly large individual impacts.

That said, research today is probably lower-impact than in the past. Research is much less neglected than it used to be: there are nearly 25 times as many researchers today as there were in 1930.³ It also turns out that more and more effort is required to discover new ideas, so each additional researcher probably has less impact than those that came before.⁴

However, even today, a relatively small fraction of people are engaged in research. As an approximation, only 0.1% of the population are academics,⁵ and only about 2.5% of GDP is spent on research and development. If a small number of people account for a large fraction of progress, then on average each person’s efforts are significant.

Moreover, we still think there’s a good case to be made for research being impactful on average today, which we cover in the next two sections.

There are good theoretical reasons to think that research will be high-impact

There’s little commercial incentive to focus on the most socially valuable research. And most researchers don’t get rich, even if their discoveries are extremely valuable. Alan Turing made no money from the discovery of the computer, and today it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. This is because the benefits of research often come a long time in the future and can’t usually be protected by patents. This means if you care more about social impact than profit, then it’s a good opportunity to have an edge.

Research is also a route to leverage. When new ideas are discovered, they can be spread incredibly cheaply, so it’s a way that a single person can change a field. And innovations are cumulative — once an idea has been discovered, it’s added to our stock of knowledge and, in the ideal case, becomes available to everyone. Even ideas that become outdated often speed up the important future discoveries that supersede it.

Research skills seem extremely useful to the problems we think are most pressing

When you look at our list of the world’s most pressing problems — like preventing future pandemics or reducing risks from AI systems — expert researchers seem like a key bottleneck.

For example, to reduce the risk posed by engineered pandemics, we need people who are talented at research to identify the biggest biosecurity risks and to develop better vaccines and treatments.

To ensure that developments in AI are implemented safely and for the benefit of humanity, we need technical experts thinking hard about how to design machine learning systems safely and policy researchers to think about how governments and other institutions should respond. (See this list of relevant research questions.)

And to decide which global priorities we should spend our limited resources on, we need economists, mathematicians, and philosophers to do global priorities research. For example, see the research agenda of the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford.

We’re not sure why so many of the most promising ways to make progress on the problems we think are most pressing involve research, but it may well be due to the reasons in the section above — research offers huge opportunities for leverage, so if you take a hits-based approach to finding the best solutions to social problems, it’ll often be most attractive.

In addition, our focus on neglected problems often means we focus on smaller and less developed areas, and it’s often unclear what the best solutions are in these areas. This means that research is required to figure this out.

For more examples, and to get a sense of what you might be able to work on in different fields, see this list of potentially high-impact research questions, organised by discipline.

If you’re a good fit, you can have much more impact than the average

The sections above give reasons why research can be expected to be impactful in general. But as we’ll show below, the productivity of individual researchers probably varies a great deal (and more than in most other careers). This means that if you have reason to think your degree of fit is better than average, your expected impact could be much higher than the average.

Depending on which subject you focus on, you may have good backup options

Pursuing research helps you develop deep expertise on a topic, problem-solving, and writing skills. These can be useful in many other career paths. For example:

• Many research areas can lead to opportunities in policymaking, since relevant technical expertise is valued in some of these positions. You might also have opportunities to advise policymakers and the public as an expert.
• The expertise and credibility you can develop by focusing on research (especially in academia) can put you in a good position to switch your focus to communicating important ideas, especially those related to your speciality, either to the general public, policymakers, or your students.
• If you specialise in an applied quantitative subject, it can open up certain high-paying jobs, such as quantitative trading or data science, which offer good opportunities for earning to give.

Some research areas will have much better backup options than others — lots of jobs value applied quantitative skills, so if your research is quantitative you may be able to transition into work in effective nonprofits or government. A history academic, by contrast, has many fewer clear backup options outside of academia.

What does building research skills typically involve?

By ‘research skills’ we broadly mean the ability to make progress solving difficult intellectual problems.

We find it especially useful to roughly divide research skills into three forms:

Academic research

Building academic research skills is the most predefined route. The focus is on answering relatively fundamental questions which are considered valuable by a specific academic discipline. This can be impactful either through generally advancing a field of research that’s valuable to society or finding opportunities to work on socially important questions within that field.

Turing was an academic. He didn’t just invent the computer — during World War II he developed code-breaking machines that allowed the Allies to be far more effective against Nazi U-boats. Some historians estimate this enabled D-Day to happen a year earlier than it would have otherwise.⁶ Since World War II resulted in 10 million deaths per year, Turing may have saved about 10 million lives.

We’re particularly excited about academic research in subfields of machine learning relevant to reducing risks from AI, subfields of biology relevant to preventing catastrophic pandemics, and economics — we discuss which fields you should enter below.

Academic careers are also excellent for developing credibility, leading to many of the backup options we looked at above, especially options in communicating important ideas or policymaking.

Academia is relatively unique in how flexibly you can use your time. This can be a big advantage — you really get time to think deeply and carefully about things — but can be a hindrance, depending on your work style.

See more about what academia involves in our career review on academia.

Practical but big picture research

Academia rewards a focus on questions that can be decisively answered with the methods of the field. However, the most important questions can rarely be answered rigorously — the best we can do is look at many weak forms of evidence and come to a reasonable overall judgement. which means while some of this research happens in academia, it can be hard to do that.

Instead, this kind of research is often done in nonprofit research institutes, e.g. the Centre for the Governance of AI or Our World in Data, or independently.

Your focus should be on answering the questions that seem most important (given your view of which global problems most matter) through whatever means are most effective.

Some examples of questions in this category that we’re especially interested in include:

• How likely is a pandemic worse than COVID-19 in the next 10 years?
• How difficult is the AI alignment problem going to be to solve?
• Which global problems are most pressing?
• Is the world getting better or worse over time?
• What can we learn from the history of philanthropy about which forms of philanthropy might be most effective?

You can see a longer list of ideas in this article.

Someone we know who’s had a big impact with research skills is Ajeya Cotra. Ajeya initially studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. In 2016, she joined Open Philanthropy as a grantmaker.⁷ Since then she’s worked on a framework for estimating when transformative AI might be developed, how worldview diversification could be applied to allocating philanthropic budgets, and how we might accidentally teach AI models to deceive us.

Applied research

Then there’s applied research. This is often done within companies or nonprofits, like think tanks (although again, there’s also plenty of applied research happening in academia). Here the focus is on solving a more immediate practical problem (and if pursued by a company, where it might be possible to make profit from the solution) — and there’s lots of overlap with engineering skills. For example:

• Developing new vaccines
• Creating new types of solar cells or nuclear reactors
• Developing meat substitutes

Neel was doing an undergraduate degree in maths when he decided that he wanted to work in AI safety. Our team was able to introduce Neel to researchers in the field and helped him secure internships in academic and industry research groups. Neel didn’t feel like he was a great fit for academia — he hates writing papers — so he applied to roles in commercial AI research labs. He’s now a research engineer at DeepMind. He works on mechanistic interpretability research which he thinks could be used in the future to help identify potentially dangerous AI systems before they can cause harm.

We also see “policy research” — which aims to develop better ideas for public policy — as a form of applied research.

Stages of progression through building and using research skills

These different forms of research blur into each other, and it’s often possible to switch between them during a career. In particular, it’s common to begin in academic research and then switch to more applied research later.

However, while the skill sets contain a common core, someone who can excel in intellectual academic research might not be well-suited to big picture practical or applied research.

The typical stages in an academic career involve the following steps:

1. Pick a field. This should be heavily based on personal fit (where you expect to be most successful and enjoy your work the most), though it’s also useful to think about which fields offer the best opportunities to help tackle the problems you think are most pressing, give you expertise that’s especially useful given these problems, and use that at least as a tie-breaker. (Read more about choosing a field.)
2. Earn a PhD.
3. Learn your craft and establish your career — find somewhere you can get great mentorship and publish a lot of impressive papers. This usually means finding a postdoc with a good group and then temporary academic positions.
4. Secure tenure.
5. Focus on the research you think is most socially valuable (or otherwise move your focus towards communicating ideas or policy).

Academia is usually seen as the most prestigious path…within academia. But non-academic positions can be just as impactful — and often more so since you can avoid some of the dysfunctions and distractions of academia, such as racing to get publications.

At any point after your PhD (and sometimes with only a master’s), it’s usually possible to switch to applied research in industry, policy, nonprofits, and so on, though typically you’ll still focus on getting mentorship and learning for at least a couple of years. And you may also need to take some steps to establish your career enough to turn your attention to topics that seem more impactful.

Note that from within academia, the incentives to continue with academia are strong, so people often continue longer than they should!

If you’re focused on practical big picture research, then there’s less of an established pathway, and a PhD isn’t required.

Besides academia, you could attempt to build these skills in any job that involves making difficult, messy intellectual judgement calls, such as investigative journalism, certain forms of consulting, buy-side research in finance, think tanks, or any form of forecasting.

Personal fit is perhaps more important for research than other skills

The most talented researchers seem to differ hugely in their impact compared to typical researchers across a wide variety of metrics and according to the opinions of other researchers.

For instance, when we surveyed biomedical researchers, they said that very good researchers were rare, and they’d be willing to turn down large amounts of money if they could get a good researcher for their lab.⁸ Professor John Todd, who works on medical genetics at Cambridge, told us:

The best people are the biggest struggle. The funding isn’t a problem. It’s getting really special people[…] One good person can cover the ground of five, and I’m not exaggerating.

This makes sense if you think the distribution of research output is very wide — that the very best researchers have a much greater output than the average researcher.

How much do researchers differ in productivity?

It’s hard to know exactly how spread out the distribution is, but there are several strands of evidence that suggest the variability is very high.

Firstly, most academic papers get very few citations, while a few get hundreds or even thousands. An analysis of citation counts in science journals found that ~47% of papers had never been cited, more than 80% had been cited 10 times or less, but the top 0.1% had been cited more than 1,000 times. A similar pattern seems to hold across individual researchers, meaning that only a few dominate — at least in terms of the recognition their papers receive.

Citation count is a highly imperfect measure of research quality, so these figures shouldn’t be taken at face-value. For instance, which papers get cited the most may depend at least partly on random factors, academic fashions, and “winner takes all” effects — papers that get noticed early end up being cited by everyone to back up a certain claim, even if they don’t actually represent the research that most advanced the field.

However, there are other reasons to think the distribution of output is highly skewed.

William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor, gathered statistics on all the research employees in national labs, university departments, and other research units, and found that productivity (as measured by total number of publications, rate of publication, and number of patents) was highly skewed, following a log-normal distribution.

Shockley suggests that researcher output is the product of several (normally distributed) random variables — such as the ability to think of a good question to ask, figure out how to tackle the question, recognize when a worthwhile result has been found, write adequately, respond well to feedback, and so on. This would explain the skewed distribution: if research output depends on eight different factors and their contribution is multiplicative, then a person who is 50% above average in each of the eight areas will in expectation be 26 times more productive than average.⁹

When we looked at up-to-date data on how productivity differs across many different areas, we found very similar results. The bottom line is that research seems to perhaps be the area where we have the best evidence for output being heavy-tailed.

Interestingly, while there’s a huge spread in productivity, the most productive academic researchers are rarely paid 10 times more than the median, since they’re on fixed university pay-scales. This means that the most productive researchers yield a large “excess” value to their field. For instance, if a productive researcher adds 10 times more value to the field than average, but is paid the same as average, they will be producing at least nine times as much net benefit to society. This suggests that top researchers are underpaid relative to their contribution, discouraging them from pursuing research and making research skills undersupplied compared to what would be ideal.

Can you predict these differences in advance?

Practically, the important question isn’t how big the spread is, but whether you could — early on in your career — identify whether or not you’ll be among the very best researchers.

There’s good news here! At least in scientific research, these differences also seem to be at least somewhat predictable ahead of time, which means the people entering research with the best fit could have many times more expected impact.

In a study, two IMF economists looked at maths professors’ scores in the International Mathematical Olympiad — a prestigious maths competition for high school students. They concluded that each additional point scored on the International Mathematics Olympiad “is associated with a 2.6 percent increase in mathematics publications and a 4.5 percent increase in mathematics citations.”

We looked at a range of data on how predictable productivity differences are in various areas and found that they’re much more predictable in research.

What does this mean for building research skills?

The large spread in productivity makes building strong research skills a lot more promising if you’re a better fit than average. And if you’re a great fit, research can easily become your best option.

And while these differences in output are not fully predictable at the start of a career, the spread is so large that it’s likely still possible to predict differences in productivity with some reliability.

This also means you should mainly be evaluating your long-term expected impact in terms of your chances of having a really big success.

That said, don’t rule yourself out too early. Firstly, many people systematically underestimate their skills. (Though others overestimate them!) Also, the impact of research can be so large that it’s often worth trying it out, even if you don’t expect you’ll succeed. This is especially true because the early steps of a research career often give you good career capital for many other paths.

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

It’s hard to predict success in advance, so we encourage an empirical approach: see if you can try it out and look at your track record.

You probably have some track record in research: many of our readers have some experience in academia from doing a degree, whether or not they intended to go into academic research. Standard academic success can also point towards being a good fit (though is nowhere near sufficient!):

• Did you get top grades at undergraduate level (a 1st in the UK or a GPA over 3.5 in the US)?
• If you do a graduate degree, what’s your class rank (if you can find that out)? If you do a PhD, did you manage to author an article in a top journal (although note that this is easier in some disciplines than others)?

Ultimately, though, your academic track record isn’t going to tell you anywhere near as much as actually trying out research. So it’s worth looking for ways to cheaply try out research (which can be easy if you’re at college). For example, try doing a summer research project and see how it goes.

Some of the key traits that suggest you might be a good fit for a research skills seem to be:

• Intelligence (Read more about whether intelligence is important for research.)
• The potential to become obsessed with a topic (Becoming an expert in anything can take decades of focused practice, so you need to be able to stick with it.)
• Relatedly, high levels of grit, self-motivation, and — especially for independent big picture research, but also for research in academia — the ability to learn and work productively without a traditional manager or many externally imposed deadlines
• Openness to new ideas and intellectual curiosity
• Good research taste, i.e. noticing when a research question matters a lot for solving a pressing problem

There are a number of other cheap ways you might try to test your fit.

Something you can do at any stage is practice research and research-based writing. One way to get started is to try learning by writing.

You could also try:

• Finding out what the prerequisites/normal backgrounds of people who go into a research area are to compare your skills and experience to them
• Reading key research in your area, trying to contribute to discussions with other researchers (e.g. via a blog or twitter), and getting feedback on your ideas
• Talking to successful researchers in a field and asking what they look for in new researchers

How to tell if you’re on track

Here are some broad milestones you could aim for while becoming a researcher:

• You’re successfully devoting time to building your research skills and communicating your findings to others. (This can often be the hardest milestone to hit for many — it can be hard to simply sustain motivation and productivity given how self-directed research often needs to be.)
• In your own judgement, you feel you have made and explained multiple novel, valid, nontrivially important (though not necessarily earth-shattering) points about important topics in your area.
• You’ve had enough feedback (comments, formal reviews, personal communication) to feel that at least several other people (whose judgement you respect and who have put serious time into thinking about your area) agree, and (as a result) feel they’ve learned something from your work. For example, lots of this feedback could come from an academic supervisor. Make sure you’re asking people in a way that gives them affordance to say you’re not doing well.
• You’re making meaningful connections with others interested in your area — connections that seem likely to lead to further funding and/or job opportunities. This could be from the organisations most devoted to your topics of interest; but, there could also be a “dissident” dynamic in which these organisations seem uninterested and/or defensive, but others are noticing this and offering help.

If you’re finding it hard to make progress in a research environment, it’s very possible that this is the result of that particular environment, rather than the research itself. So it can be worth testing out multiple different research jobs before deciding this skill set isn’t for you.

Within academic research

Academia has clearly defined stages, so you can see how you’re performing at each of these.

Very roughly, you can try asking “How quickly and impressively is my career advancing, by the standards of my institution and field?” (Be careful to consider the field as a whole, rather than just your immediate peers, who might be very different from average.) Academics with more experience than you may be able to help give you a clear idea of how things are going.

We go through this in detail in our review of academic research careers.

Within independent research

As a very rough guideline, people who are an excellent fit for independent research can often reach the broad milestones above with a year of full-time effort purely focusing on building a research skill set, or 2–3 years of 20%-time independent effort (i.e. one day per week).

Within research in industry or policy

The stages here can look more like an organisation-building career, and you can also assess your fit by looking at your rate of progression through the organisation.

How to get started building research skills

As we mentioned above, if you’ve done an undergraduate degree, one obvious pathway into research is to go to graduate school (read our advice on choosing a graduate programme) and then attempt to enter academia before deciding whether to continue or pursue positions outside of academia later in your career.

If you take the academic path, then the next steps are relatively clear. You’ll want to try to get excellent grades in undergraduate and in your master’s, ideally gain some kind of research experience in your summers, and then enter the best PhD programme you can. From there, focus on learning your craft by working under the best researcher you can find as a mentor and working in a top hub for your field. Try to publish as many papers as possible since that’s required to land an academic position.

It’s also not necessary to go to graduate school to become a great researcher (though this depends a lot on the field), especially if you’re very talented.
For instance, we interviewed Chris Olah, who is working on AI research without even an undergraduate degree.

You can enter many non-academic research jobs without a background in academia. So one starting point for building up research skills would be getting a job at an organisation specifically focused on the type of question you’re interested in. For examples, take a look at our list of recommended organisations, many of which conduct non-academic research in areas relevant to pressing problems.

More generally, you can learn research skills in any job that heavily features making difficult intellectual judgement calls and bets, preferably on topics that are related to the questions you’re interested in researching. These might include jobs in finance, political analysis, or even nonprofits.

Another common route — depending on your field — is to develop software and tech skills and then apply them at research organisations. For instance, here’s a guide to how to transition from software engineering into AI safety research.

If you’re interested in doing practical big-picture research (especially outside academia), it’s also possible to establish your career through self-study and independent work — during your free time or on scholarships designed for this (such as EA Long-Term Future Fund grants and Open Philanthropy support for individuals working on relevant topics).

Some example approaches you might take to self-study:

• Closely and critically review some pieces of writing and argumentation on relevant topics. Explain the parts you agree with as clearly as you can and/or explain one or more of your key disagreements.
• Pick a relevant question and write up your current view and reasoning on it. Alternatively, write up your current view and reasoning on some sub-question that comes up as you’re thinking about it.
• Then get feedback, ideally from professional researchers or those who use similar kinds of research in their jobs.

It could also be beneficial to start with some easier versions of this sort of exercise, such as:

• Explaining or critiquing interesting arguments made on any topic you find motivating to write about
• Writing fact posts
• Reviewing the academic literature on any topic of interest and trying to reach and explain a bottom-line conclusion

In general, it’s not necessary to obsess over being “original” or having some new insight at the beginning. You can learn a lot just by trying to write up your current understanding.

Choosing a research field

When you’re getting started building research skills, there are three factors to consider in choosing a field:

1. Personal fit — what are your chances of being a top researcher in the area? Even if you work on an important question, you won’t make much difference if you’re not particularly good at it or motivated to work on the problem.
2. Impact — how likely is it that research in your field will contribute to solving pressing problems?
3. Back-up options — how will the skills you build open up other options if you decide to change fields (or leave research altogether)?

One way to go about making a decision is to roughly narrow down fields by relevance and back-up options and then pick among your shortlist based on personal fit.

We’ve found that, especially when they’re getting started building research skills, people sometimes think too narrowly about what they can be good at and enjoy. Instead, they end up pigeonholing themselves in a specific area (for example being restricted by the field of their undergraduate degree). This can be harmful because it means people who could contribute to highly important research don’t even consider it. This increases the importance of writing a broad list of possible areas to research.

Given our list of the world’s most pressing problems, we think some of the most promising fields to do research within are as follows:

• Fields relevant to artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, but also computer science more broadly. This is mainly to work on AI safety directly, though there are also many opportunities to apply machine learning to other problems (as well as many back-up options).
• Biology, particularly synthetic biology, virology, public health, and epidemiology. This is mainly for biosecurity.
• Economics. This is for global priorities research, development economics, or policy research relevant to any cause area, especially global catastrophic risks.
• Engineering — read about developing and using engineering skills to have an impact.
• International relations/political science, including security studies and public policy — these enable you to do research into policy approaches to mitigating catastrophic risks and are also a good route into careers in government and policy more broadly.
• Mathematics, including applied maths or statistics (or even physics). This may be a good choice if you’re very uncertain, as it teaches you skills that can be applied to a whole range of different problems — and lets you move into most of the other fields we list. It’s relatively easy to move from a mathematical PhD into machine learning, economics, biology, or political science, and there are opportunities to apply quantitative methods to a wide range of other fields. They also offer good back-up options outside of research.
• There are many important topics in philosophy and history, but these fields are unusually hard to advance within, and don’t have as good back-up options. (We do know lots of people with philosophy PhDs who have gone on to do other great, non-philosophy work!)

However, many different kinds of research skills can play a role in tackling pressing global problems.

Choosing a sub-field can sometimes be almost as important as choosing a field. For example, in some sciences the particular lab you join will determine your research agenda — and this can shape your entire career.

And as we’ve covered, personal fit is especially important in research. This can mean it’s easily worth going into a field that seems less relevant on average if you are an excellent fit. (This is due both to the value of the research you might produce and the excellent career capital that comes from becoming top of an academic field.)

For instance, while we most often recommend the fields above, we’d be excited to see some of our readers go into history, psychology, neuroscience, and a whole number of other fields. And if you have a different view of global priorities from us, there might be many other highly relevant fields.

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

Richard Hamming used to annoy his colleagues by asking them “What’s the most important question in your field?”, and then after they’d explained, following up with “And why aren’t you working on it?”

You don’t always need to work on the very most important question in your field, but Hamming has a point. Researchers often drift into a narrow speciality and can get detached from the questions that really matter.

Now let’s suppose you’ve chosen a field, learned your craft, and are established enough that you have some freedom about where to focus. Which research questions should you focus on?

Which research topics are the highest-impact?

Charles Darwin travelled the oceans to carefully document different species of birds on a small collection of islands — documentation which later became fuel for the theory of evolution. This illustrates how hard it is to predict which research will be most impactful.

What’s more, we can’t know what we’re going to discover until we’ve discovered it, so research has an inherent degree of unpredictability. There’s certainly an argument for curiosity-driven research without a clear agenda.

That said, we think it’s also possible to increase your chances of working on something relevant, and the best approach is to try to find topics that both personally motivate you and seem more likely than average to matter. Here are some approaches to doing that.

Using the problem framework

One approach is to ask yourself which global problems you think are most pressing, and then try to identify research questions that are:

• Important to making progress on those problems (i.e. if this question were answered, it would lead to more progress on these problems)
• Neglected by other researchers (e.g. because they’re at the intersection of two fields, unpopular for bad reasons, or new)
• Tractable (i.e. you can see a path to making progress)

The best research questions will score at least moderately well on all parts of this framework. Building a perpetual motion machine is extremely important — if we could do it, then we’d solve our energy problems — but we have good reason to think it’s impossible, so it’s not worth working on. Similarly, a problem can be important but already have the attention of many extremely talented researchers, meaning your extra efforts won’t go very far.

Finding these questions, however, is difficult. Often, the only way to identify a particularly promising research question is to be an expert in that field! That’s because (when researchers are doing their jobs), they will be taking the most obvious opportunities already.

However, the incentives within research rarely perfectly line up with the questions that most matter (especially if you have unusual values, like more concern for future generations or animals). This means that some questions often get unfairly neglected. If you’re someone who does care a lot about positive impact and have some slack, you can have a greater-than-average impact by looking for them.

Below are some more ways of finding those questions (which you can use in addition to directly applying the framework above).

Rules of thumb for finding unfairly neglected questions

• There’s little money in answering the question. This can be because the problem mostly affects poorer people, people who are in the future, or non-humans, or because it involves public goods. This means there’s little incentive for businesses to do research on this question.
• The political incentives to answer the question are missing. This can happen when the problem hurts poorer or otherwise marginalised people, people who tend not to organise politically, people in countries outside the one where the research is most likely to get done, people who are in the future, or non-humans. This means there’s no incentive for governments or other public actors to research this question.
• It’s new, doesn’t already have an established discipline, or is at the intersection of two disciplines. The first researchers in an area tend to take any low hanging fruit, and it gets harder and harder from there to make big discoveries. For example, the rate of progress within machine learning is far higher than the rate of progress within theoretical physics. At the same time, the structure of academia means most researchers stay stuck within the field they start in, and it can be hard to get funding to branch out into other areas. This means that new fields or questions at the intersection of two disciplines often get unfairly neglected and therefore provide opportunities for outsized impact.
• There is some aspect of human irrationality that means people don’t correctly prioritise the issue. For instance, some issues are easy to visualise, which makes them more motivating to work on. People are scope blind which means they’re likely to neglect the issues with the very biggest scale. They’re also bad at reasoning about issues with low probability, which can make them either over-invest or under-invest in them.
• Working on the question is low status. In academia, research that’s intellectually interesting and fits the research standards of the discipline are high status. Also, mathematical and theoretical work tends to be seen as higher status (and therefore helps to progress your career). But these don’t correlate that well with the social value of the question.
• You’re bringing new skills or a new perspective to an established area. Progress often comes in science from bringing the techniques and insights of one field into another. For instance, Kahneman started a revolution in economics by applying findings from psychology. Cross-over is an obvious approach but is rarely used because researchers tend to be immersed in their own particular subject.

If you think you’ve found a research question that’s short on talent, it’s worth checking whether the question is answerable. People might be avoiding the question because it’s just extremely difficult to find an answer. Or perhaps progress isn’t possible at all. Ask yourself, “If there were progress on this question, how would we know?”

Finally, as we’ve discussed, personal fit is particularly important in research. So position yourself to work on questions where you maximise your chances of producing top work.

Find jobs that use a research skills

If you have these skills already or are developing it and you’re ready to start looking at job opportunities that are currently accepting applications, see our curated list of opportunities for this skill set:

View all opportunities

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use these skills

• AI safety technical research and engineering
• AI governance and coordination
• Biorisk research
• China-related AI safety and governance paths
• Grantmaker focused on pressing world problems
• Research into global priorities
• Forecasting and related research and implementation
• Historian of large societal trends, inflection points, progress or collapse
• Expert in AI hardware

• Specialist in emerging global powers

• Investigate a potentially pressing but unexplored global issue
• Research management
• Think tank research
• Academic research
• Research and advocacy promoting impactful climate solutions
• Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks
• Engineering
• Economics PhDs
• Machine learning PhDs
• Biomedical research
• Computer science PhDs
• Data science
• Philosophy academia

Learn more about research

• High Impact Science by Carl Shulman
• How to succeed as an early-stage researcher: the “lean startup” approach
• Podcast: Luisa and Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun
• A list of potentially high-impact research questions, organised by discipline

See all our articles and podcasts on research 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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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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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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