What Career Will Give You the Greatest Social Impact?
24 August 2015 at 11:31 am
What careers will allow you to make the greatest social impact? One organisation has set out to answer that question.
80,000 Hours, an organisation founded by Oxford University student Will MacAskill, recently launched a new online tool that allows people to see what social impact careers they are most suited to.
The Career Recommender, requires users to take a six-question quiz before offering the four best-matched career options.
When this journalist took the test it a career in marketing was recommended.
Executive Director of the Centre for Effective Altruism, Rob Wiblin, launched the tool in August this year, writing that it could potentially “significantly [change] the course of your career”.
“Our goal is to ask you just a questions and then tell you in what careers you can have the greatest social impact,” Wiblin said.
“If that sounds ambitious, that’s because it is. But the thousands of people who have already used it during testing it have found it surprisingly useful.”
At the moment there are only 25 careers that users can be matched with, but Wiblin said the organisation was hoping to grow this number.
“We expect the career recommender to remain a core part of our career guide in the future. It’s already useful, but it will become much more so over time as our research expands and we ‘review’ and rate a wider range of paths, especially those in which people can achieve great things without having to have far above average quantitative or language skills, change the questions to more precisely measure people’s key abilities [and] check that it gives good answers for any possible set of inputs,” he said.
80,000 Hours researches ways that people can do the most good through their careers, looking not at the direct impact people make but the marginal difference.
It’s name comes from the approximate number of hours that the average person will spend working in their lifetime.
The organization is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism, which also encompasses Giving What We Can, a society of people who each contribute at least 10 per cent of their income to effectively fighting developing-world poverty.
