We’ve spent the last few months updating 80,000 Hours’ career guide (which we previously released in 2017 and which you've been able to get as a physical book). Today, we’ve put our new career guide live on our website. Before we formally launch and promote the guide - and republish the book - we’d like to gather feedback from you!
How can you help?
Take a look at the new career guide, which you can find at 80000hours.org/career-guide/.
Please bear in mind that the vast majority of people who read the 80,000 Hours website are not EAs. Rather, our target audience for this career guide is approximately the ~100k young adults most likely to have high-impact careers, in the English speaking world. In particular, many of them are not yet familiar with many of the ideas that are widely discussed in the EA community. Also, this guide is primarily aimed at people aged 18-24.
When you’re ready there’s a simple form to fill in:
Thank you so much!
Extra context: why are we making this change?
In 2018, we deprioritised 80,000 Hours’ career guide in favour of our key ideas series.
Our key ideas series had a more serious tone, and was more focused on impact. It represented our best and most up-to-date advice. We expected that this switch would reduce engagement time on our site, but that the key ideas series would better appeal to people more likely to change their careers to do good.
However, the drop in engagement time which we could attribute to this change was larger than we’d expected. In addition, data from our user survey suggested that people who changed their careers were more, not less, likely to have found and used the older, more informal career guide (which we kept up on our site).
As a result, we decided to bring the advice in our career guide in line with our latest views, while attempting to retain its structure, tone and engagingness.
We’re retaining the content in our key ideas series: it’s been re-released as our advanced series.
I'm excited to see the return of the careers guide as the core 80k resource (vs the key ideas series)! I think it's a better way to provide value to people, because a careers guide is about the individual ("how can I think about what to do with my career?") rather than about 80k ("what are the key ideas of 80k/EA?")
How did you measure a "drop in engagement time which we could attribute to this change"? Some relevant metrics are page view counts, time spent on the website, number of clicks, number of applications to 80k advising, etc.
By "engagement time" I mean exactly "time spent on the website".
When is this change coming to the Portuguese version?
The Portuguese version at 80000horas.com.br is a project of Altruísmo Eficaz Brasil. We often give people permission to translate our content when they ask - but as to when, that would be up to Altruísmo Eficaz Brasil! Sorry I can't give you a more concrete answer.