80,000 Hours

What problem is 80,000 Hours working on?

You have 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years.

That’s a huge amount of time. And it means that your career is not only a major driver of your happiness — it’s probably also your biggest opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.

So how can you best spend those hours?

What does 80,000 Hours do?

80,000 Hours aims to solve the most pressing skill bottlenecks in the world’s most pressing problems.

It does this by providing research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle these problems.

In more depth, 80,000 Hours:

• Carries out research to identify the careers that best solve these problems.
• Produces online content to inform people about these opportunities and how to enter them. This includes the key ideas series, podcast, job board, problem profiles, and career reviews — which collectively have over 1 million readers per year.
• Gives one-on-one support to help the most engaged readers enter the path that’s the best fit for them by providing advice, introductions, and placements into specific jobs.

80,000 Hours is a nonprofit funded by philanthropic donations, and all of its programmes are free.

Its advice is currently tailored to graduates aged 20–35 who want to ambitiously focus on social impact, though much of its advice is useful to a broader audience.

What evidence is there of 80,000 Hours’ effectiveness?

80,000 Hours meets our criteria to be listed on our donation platform because one of our trusted evaluators, Longview, have made grants to them based on their assessment that 80,000 Hours is highly cost-effective. (Our trusted evaluators are charitable giving experts who focus on impact — their research into the best charities means your donations can do even more good. Learn more about charity evaluators we trust and why.)

Note that we, 80,000 Hours, and Longview are all part of Effective Ventures — see our transparency page.

Why donate through the Giving What We Can donation platform?

Your donations through our portal are tax deductible in the UK, US, and the Netherlands. Giving What We Can does not take any fees from donors using our platform or from charities listed on our platform. We are independently funded to promote our mission of making giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm. Read more on our transparency page.