EA - Announcing the new 80,000 Hours Career Guide by Benjamin Hilton

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing the new 80,000 Hours Career Guide, published by Benjamin Hilton on September 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.From 2016 to 2019, 80,000 Hours' core content was contained in our persistently popular career guide. (You may also remember it as the 80,000 Hours book: 80,000 Hours - Find a fulfilling career that does good).Today, we're re-launching that guide. Among many other changes, in the new version:We've substantially changed our recommendations on career capital.We have significantly improved and extended our article on career planning.We improved our advice on personal fit and career exploration.We added sections on why community-building, government and policy, and organisation-building careers could be high impact.We focus more on avoiding harm (in line with our updates following the collapse of FTX), and explicitly discuss Sam Bankman-Fried when talking about earning to give.We are more upfront about 80,000 Hours' focus on existential risk in particular (while also discussing a wide variety of cause areas, including global health, animal welfare, existential risk and meta-causes).We've updated the more empirical sections of the guide using more up-to-date papers and data.You can read the guide here or start with a 2-minute summary.It's also available as a printed book (you can get a free copy by signing up for our newsletter, or buy it on Amazon), audiobook, podcast series or ebook (available as a .pdf or .epub).We'd appreciate you sharing the new guide with a friend! You can send them a free copy using this link. Many of the people who've found our advice most useful in the past have found us via a friend, so we think the time you take to share it could be really worthwhile.What's in the guide?The career guide aims to cover the most important basic concepts in career planning. (If instead you'd like to see something more in-depth, see our advanced series and podcast.)The first article is about what to look for in a fulfilling job:Part 1: What makes for a dream job?The next five are about which options are most impactful for the world:Part 2: Can one person make a difference?Part 3: How to have a real positive impact in any jobPart 4: How to choose which problems to focus onPart 5: What are the world's biggest and most urgent problems?Part 6: What types of jobs help the most?The next four cover how to find the best option for you and invest in your skills:Part 7: Which jobs put you in a better position?Part 8: How to find the right career for youPart 9: How to be more successful in any jobPart 10: How to write a career planThe last two cover how to take action and launch your dream career:Part 11: How to get a jobPart 12: How community can helpAdvice (for EAs) on how to read the guideThe topics we tackle are complex, and in the past we've noticed people interpreting our advice in ways we didn't intend. Here are some points to bear in mind before diving in.We've been wrong before and we'll be wrong again. While we've spent a lot of time thinking about these issues, we still have a lot to learn. Our positions have changed over the years, and due to the nature of the questions we take on, we're rarely more than about 70% confident in our answers. You should try to strike a balance between what we think and your previous position, depending on the strength of the arguments and how much you already knew about the topic.It's extremely difficult to give universally applicable career advice. Most importantly, the option that's best for you depends a huge amount on your skills, circumstances, and the specific details of the opportunity. So, while we might highlight path A more than path B, the best opportunities in path B will often be better than the typical opportunities in path A. Moreover, your personal circumstanc...