Some people achieve monumental climate progress with their career. In 2013, Marjan Minnesma, a Dutch climate activist, and Roger Cox, a lawyer, took an audacious move. They sued the Dutch government for violating the human rights of its citizens by failing to take bold action on climate change. At first, they were ridiculed: few people expected that a government was legally required to protect its citizens from dangerous climate change. But Minnesma and Cox were right: in 2015, the Court ruled that the government is legally required to reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement—-a goal that it wasn’t on track to meet. This court case has sparked a wave of successful climate litigation around the world. The story of Marjan Minnesma and Roger Cox is inspiring, because it shows how a small group of motivated people can make a profound difference.

You’ll have about 80,000 hours in your career. How you spend this time is likely the most important decision you ever make. We invite you to take some time to think critically about how you can use your skills and time to make a difference in the world. This does not only help you to achieve a far greater positive impact—it could leave you feeling more motivated, energized, and inspired at work. Doing meaningful work can be a rewarding experience.

Nine tips for building an impactful career

We can’t tell you which job you should apply for or which project to start, because this will depend on your personal fit. Everyone’s background, aspirations, interests, and skills are different. However, we can offer some useful advice that we think allows you to think more critically about the impact you’ll make in your working life. We’ll cover some of these ideas below.

1. Don’t just “follow your passion”

“Follow your passion” is advice that many job-seekers will get, but does it make sense? It is appealing to believe that if we just work on the projects or causes that we’re most passionate about, we’ll make the most impact, because we feel motivated to put in the work. Maybe work will even feel like a hobby—and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

We won’t sugarcoat it. We think that “follow your passion” is bad career advice. Your passions aren't set in stone. Perhaps your current passion will at some point feel dull if it becomes a 9 to 5. Or maybe you can grow super passionate about a cause you haven't even heard about yet! Instead, think about what type of work will lead to a considerable and long-lastig impact, and will keep you feeling rewarded and motivated. 

Many people who start a new impactful job find out that they can grow incredibly passionate about something they never thought about before. For example, if the author of this page would have followed his passion, he would’ve been a studio technician. But after he found out about his fit for charity research, he’s become very excited about making non-profits more effective. He still enjoys music technology, but can enjoy it fully as a hobby, without feeling the pressure to make a profit.

2. Take your time to think

Your impact comes from two sources. 

• Firstly, it simply depends on how many hours of work you put in. As most people will work near full-time, increasing your working hours is not a viable way of increasing your impact without risking a burn-out or neglecting your family, social life, and hobbies. 

• Secondly, it depends on what you work on and the quality of the work that you deliver. Ironically, we spend so much time doing our work that we rarely have time to stop and think about how we can better spend our time.

It’s worth taking quite some time to think about things that will increase your impact only slightly. If you’re at the start of your career, you’ll still work about 80,000 hours. If you can find a way to make your career 10% more impactful, then it’s worth putting in up to 8,000 hours to think about this question. Of course, this does not paint a completely fair picture, because we’re unsure what the future will hold. Maybe more prosperity means that we will work less in the future. Besides, the clock is ticking on climate action, and we don’t have much time to wait. But in general, we think that taking some time to think critically about how you can best contribute to environmental progress is a worthwhile endeavour.

3. Find something that works at scale

The intuition behind the idea of scale is simply that working on bigger problems is better than working on smaller problems, other things equal. Tackling emissions from iron and steel would be way more impactful than tackling emissions from paper and pulp, simply because the emissions from iron and steel are twelve times higher.

Humans are bad at thinking at scale. We often vastly underestimate or misjudge the differences in the size of problems. For example, a global survey by Ipsos found that, on average, people think that recycling and reducing packaging is the most important climate solution, even though the emissions from packaging are nearly negligible compared to other food emissions. Behavioural scientists also call this ‘scope insensitivity’: we can’t intuitively grasp that some issues are much larger than others. To overcome this bias, it’s helpful to make simple back-of-the-envelope calculations about how many tonnes of CO₂ emissions you expect to avert for different career paths. You can find some examples of such calculations here.

4. Find something that no-one else does

Scarcity drives value. Why is gold more valuable than water? Gold has almost no inherent uses. If you were stranded on an uninhabited island and you could either bring a bottle of water or a lump of gold, it would be foolish to bring gold. Yet, the price of gold is thousands of times higher than the price of water. Why? It’s simply because gold is much more scarce. Likewise, you can provide a lot of value for environmental progress by doing work that other people can’t do or haven’t even thought about.

The less crowded a space is, the more impact you’ll likely make. Imagine you’re running an ambulance service for a remote town with several thousand inhabitants. The first ambulance crew you hire are doing vital, life-saving work. For many inhabitants, they provide a service that will mean the difference between life and death. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that there are multiple accidents at the same time, and the ambulance can only go to one. To deal with these cases, you hire a second ambulance crew. This crew will still do life-saving work, although on the margin, they’re much less impactful than the first ambulance crew. If you would hire a third ambulance crew, they will sit the entire day playing cards at the coffee table. The important message here is: in very neglected or uncrowded spaces, you can make a much larger impact.

Basketball provides us with a great way to think about neglectedness. The “Value Over Replacement Player” or VORP measures how important a player is to the team. Sure, maybe the star player scores a lot, but what matters most is how much better they are than the average substitute you could bring in. Similarly, your impact in a given cause area isn’t just about how useful the work is — it’s about how much more useful you are than the next best person who would otherwise do that job. In a crowded space, your VORP might be low, because someone else would do nearly the same work. But in a neglected area, your VORP can be huge.

Climate change is not a very neglected global problem, so it’s vital to find a niche where you can have a large impact. While climate headlines can sound depressing, it gets much more funding and attention than problems like malaria, pandemic risks, and animal suffering. This makes it all the more vital to work on a niche that affects many emissions, but receives much less attention. For example, accelerating the protein transition and growing geothermal energy are niches that get much less attention relative to their potential.

5. Find leverage points

Not all actions are created equal. In any system, whether it's climate change, global health, or food production, some interventions are vastly more effective than others, because they push on leverage points. These are places in a system where a small change can lead to large, cascading effects. Imagine you're trying to slow down a moving train. You could run alongside it and try to push it with your hands. That’s not very effective. Or you could pull a brake lever. In both cases you're exerting effort, but only one makes a meaningful difference. The same principle applies to career impact: identifying high-leverage interventions is often what separates a well-intentioned effort from a transformative one.

When you're deciding where to focus, look for work that shifts systems, rather than treating symptoms. This could mean developing a scalable technology, changing an institution’s long-term direction, shaping public opinion, or creating tools others can build on. These kinds of interventions are tractable not because they’re easy, but because they create positive feedback loops, enabling others to amplify your work. Take, for example, clean energy policy. Convincing one city to switch to renewables is good. But helping design legislation that sets a national standard can drive changes across hundreds of cities—multiplying your impact. Or consider research: one well-executed paper on a neglected solution (like low-carbon cement or enhanced geothermal energy) might redirect millions in funding or launch entire new sectors. That’s the power of a leverage point.

Importantly, tractability isn’t about finding easy wins. It’s about identifying interventions that unlock progress where it’s currently stuck. These actions often don’t reduce emissions or solve problems directly, but instead shift the conditions of the system: changing rules, incentives, norms, or technologies in ways that enable broader progress. When you find the right point to intervene, even a small effort can lead to large, lasting change. In many cases, the most effective work isn’t the most visible, but it’s the work that quietly makes future efforts more likely to succeed.

6. Find your personal fit

Even if a job is highly impactful in theory, it won’t be impactful for you unless you’re well-suited to it. That’s why personal fit (how well your abilities, interests, and work styles align with a role) is crucial when choosing a career to maximize your impact.

Personal fit is one of the most important factors in determining your potential impact. If you excel in a role, you can achieve significantly more than someone who is just competent. Conversely, if you're not well-suited to a role, your impact may be limited, regardless of the role's theoretical importance.

Personal fit also affects your motivation and job satisfaction. When you're in a role that aligns with your strengths and interests, you're more likely to stay engaged and committed over the long term, which is essential for building expertise and achieving substantial impact.

Assessing personal fit isn't always straightforward, but here are some strategies:

• Reflect on past experiences: Consider which tasks or projects you've enjoyed and excelled at in the past.

• Seek feedback: Ask colleagues, mentors, or supervisors about your strengths and areas where you add the most value.

• Experiment: Try out different roles or projects through internships, volunteering, or side projects to gain firsthand experience.

7. Avoid doing harm

When thinking about how to do good with your career, it’s tempting to focus only on the positive impact you can create. But the other side of the coin is equally important: avoiding unintended harm.

While that sounds obvious, some well-intended actions can cause unintended harm by displacing more effective efforts, creating negative side effects, or exacerbating hidden risks. Taking time to understand the potential downsides of your work is a key part of acting responsibly and effectively.

First, watch out for opportunity costs. Even if your work is well-intentioned and productive, it might consume scarce external resources, like funding, regulatory attention, technical expertise, or public goodwill, that could otherwise support more effective efforts. This is a form of opportunity cost: if your project displaces higher-impact alternatives, its true value may be lower than it seems.

For instance, launching a new ineffective climate initiative that relies heavily on philanthropic funding or engineering talent might pull those limited resources away from efforts that are more effective. Similarly, advocating for a low-leverage policy reform could consume political bandwidth that might have gone toward bolder, systemic changes. 

This doesn’t always hold true. And it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use resources, as most worthwhile projects do. But it does mean being deliberate about how you use them, and asking: What would likely happen with these resources if I didn’t use them? Would they support a more promising intervention?

Second, avoid harm to humans. In the end, we fight climate change to create a better world. Some well-intentioned climate interventions can hurt vulnerable communities if designed without care. For example, policies that rapidly eliminate fossil fuels in low-income regions, without providing affordable alternatives, can lead to energy poverty. 

Third, avoid harm to animals. Environmental choices can also affect animals—often in unintuitive ways. One example is the small animal replacement problem or SARP: switching from beef to chicken may reduce emissions, but it increases the number of animals raised and killed, often in far worse conditions. While this may still be a climate win, it comes at a major cost to animal welfare. If you care about reducing suffering across species, it's worth evaluating the full effects of dietary, technological, or policy shifts—not just emissions per kilogram. Sometimes, the most “efficient” solution on paper can be the most ethically fraught in practice.

8. Be careful with building career capital

There’s a trade-off between getting more skilled and making an impact sooner. Building skills, credentials, and networks can be a smart way to increase your long-term impact. But when it comes to climate change, timing matters. Emissions need to fall drastically in the next two decades to limit warming, which means early action is disproportionately valuable.

For climate action, taking quick action is often better than waiting. Spending too long in generic training roles or low-relevance industries may leave you better prepared, but at a time when the window for meaningful intervention has narrowed. Some climate tipping points are irreversible; acting sooner could avoid damage that no amount of later skill can undo.

That doesn’t mean you should never invest in career capital. For some people, it’s the best option—especially if they’re not yet in a position to contribute effectively. But aim to build career capital that aligns with urgent needs: for example, developing skills in policy, modeling, or energy systems while contributing to real-world solutions in parallel. And while you can sometimes build career capital while making an impact, you should consider the benefits that career capital brings to yourself.

9. Consider working on other global problems

Climate change is a critical and urgent challenge, but it is not the only one. Other global issues, such as animal suffering, artificial intelligence safety, biosecurity, and global health, also pose enormous risks and offer major opportunities to improve the future. Depending on your skills and values, working in one of these areas could lead to even greater impact.

Some of these problems receive far less attention and funding than climate change. For example, animal welfare and AI safety are often overlooked, even though they may affect billions or trillions of beings. Because they are more neglected, it is often easier to find roles where your contribution makes a big counterfactual difference.

If you have a strong personal fit for working on climate, that is a good reason to focus there. But if your background, interests, or values align more with other issues—such as reducing factory farming, preventing catastrophic pandemics, or ensuring safe and aligned artificial intelligence—those are worth exploring too.

The key is to focus where you can make the greatest difference, given your unique position. That might be in climate work, or it might be elsewhere. Being truly impact-focused means going where your skills are most needed, not just where the public conversation happens to be loudest.

Recommended resources

Guides for finding high-impact careers

• 80,000 Hours has a guide on effective climate change careers

• Probably Good lists jobs that allow the right people to fight climate change by working on high-priority issues. 

• High Impact Engineers has a climate change career guide for technical roles.

• If you’re a good fit for research, check out the suggested topics by Effective Thesis.

Tools to find high-impact jobs and get recruited

• Effective Environmentalism Talent Directory: We’ve collaborated with High Impact Professionals (HIP) to build a directory of talented professionals motivated to make a substantial contribution to environmental progress. Impact-oriented organisations can use the Talent Directory to recruit new staff and share opportunities.

• The 80,000 Hours job board has jobs that are handpicked to help you tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

• The Probably Good job board has a curated list of high-impact jobs for people who want to make a difference.

• The EA Opportunity Board has opportunities in climate change, too. (Use the cause area filter to find climate-related ones.)

Other resources

These resources might help you find a climate career, but aren’t vetted for maximizing impact.

• So You Want to Work in Climate is a crowdsourced selection of 750+ career resources.

• An overview of climate job boards

We're grateful to Jian Xin for providing useful feedback on this article. Advice does not imply endorsement and any mistakes remain ours.