Tl:dr If you’d like to use your career to help others as much as possible, you should apply to speak with the 80,000 Hours team!

I’ve been working in the one-on-one team at 80,000 Hours for over a year and a half, where I mostly do careers advising calls.^[1] I’m really excited about the plans that we have to expand and help more people! This post has a bit of an update on advising in case you were unsure whether it is for you^[2] :)

We’re doing more calls than ever before

This year we’ve focused on increasing the amount of people we can help:

• We did >750 advising calls this year. That’s more calls in a year than 80,000 Hours have ever done before!
• We also hired two new advisors, Alex Lawsen and Matt Reardon. So, plus me, that’s more people focused on helping people one-on-one than 80,000 Hours has ever had.

And we’re hoping to continue expanding in 2022.

We’re really keen to help more people. We'd love more people to apply to speak with the team.

How can we help?

We’d really like to help you have more impact with your career!

Here are some of the things we can do on a call:

• Talk through cause prioritisation - help you think through what problems you want to work on
• Consider your options - talk through what different paths might look like, try and answer some of your questions about them, suggest new options you might not have thought of, and help you narrow things down
• Connect you up with more people - to hear more about the particular field you’re interested in or just get to know more people in the community
• Work out some next steps - suggest specific jobs, funding opportunities, resources to check out, or other next steps you can take
• Debug your plan - if you already have a good idea of what you want to do, we can be a sounding board and help sense-check your thinking

For more on what speaking with us is like and how we can help, you can check out this podcast with Michelle Hutchinson.

Who should apply?

We want to talk to people who are taking an analytical approach to doing the most good with their career. We’re most helpful for people who are interested in the problems we think are most pressing, taking seriously the aim to help people as much as possible over the long term.

We’re excited to talk to people at all different stages of their career!

In case you weren’t sure:

• We do talk to people who are very involved in the EA community
• We do talk to undergraduates and even sometimes high school students
• We do talk to people who have decades of experience already
• We do talk to people who are already on a path they think is impactful (but still would find it useful to talk to someone about their career)
• We do talk to people who are super uncertain about what they want to do

If you’re not sure whether to apply, go for it! It doesn’t take long, you can always apply again later if you want, and sometimes even just filling in the application form is helpful in thinking through your career. Also it’s free :)

We can’t talk to absolutely everyone who applies, but we read each application and try to work out if we can help.

We currently speak with about half the people who apply. And even if we don’t speak to you ourselves, we may be able to put you in touch with someone else who we think can help.

We’re really excited about helping the EA community be diverse and welcoming. So we’d love to get more applications from women, people of colour, and people of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Apply now!

So, here’s that link again to speak with the team. Check it out :)