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Introduction
You have 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years.
If you’ve found yourself here, it’s probably because you, like me (Jess), chose to study engineering as it was the degree that seemed to best use your scientific skills to positively impact the world. A recent survey of over 600,000 teenagers across the world found that almost 5% of them want to become engineers, making this the 4th most desired occupation (behind doctors, teachers and business managers).
As engineers who want to do as much good as possible with our careers, we at High Impact Engineers (HI-Eng for short) felt that we lacked the resources and community to pursue impactful work.
HI-Eng was created to communicate research on the highest-impact engineering problems and provide coordination and resources for engineers to tackle these problems. This includes over 10 years of research from 80,000 Hours, work from economics and philosophy academics at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford, Open Philanthropy, and many other non-profit research institutions.
HI-Eng is part of the Effective Altruism community, which aims to do the most good with the limited resources that we have.
How We Can Help You
Our aim at High Impact Engineers is similar to that of 80,000 Hours: it is to help you move from having no idea of what to do, to being in a satisfying job that fulfils your potential for impact.
Here are 3 key steps we can help you with:
Learn what makes for a high-impact career.
Get ideas for pressing problems you could work on.
Create a career plan and follow through.
Here’s how we can help with each stage:
1. Learn what makes for a high-impact career
What does it even mean to make a difference? This first step is where we summarise the ideas and principles from Effective Altruism on our Key Ideas page. We think you’ll find these ideas and principles familiar to those of us with engineering backgrounds.
2. Get ideas for impactful problems you could work on
To help you come up with ideas for what to work on, we summarise the research from organisations across Effective Altruism, particularly where it coincides with your strengths as an engineer. You can explore them in our Cause Areas deep dives.
We believe that engineers are particularly well-placed to have a meaningful impact over our careers. However, you might find that engineering is not the best fit for you - we have members of our community who have pivoted into other careers that use their quantitative and analysis skills in a different context to have extremely high-impact careers. Resources for these can be found on the following links:
Policy
Journalism and communications
Operations and organisation-building
Movement-building
Earning to give
Our podcast might be able to provide some inspiration from different engineers doing high-impact work. You can also discuss your own and others’ ideas for impact in our Slack community.
3. Create a Career Plan and Follow Through
80,000 Hours have created an 8-week career plan course that we think you’ll find very valuable.
You can then book a free career conversation with the High Impact Engineering team, who can help you discuss your plan, introduce you to opportunities, other engineers with similar backgrounds and interests, or people who are doing high-impact work in the field you’re interested in.
To help you test your career plan, we send out a hand-picked selection of the most promising opportunities for engineers in our newsletter each month. We can also direct you to funding if you’d like to set up a project yourself.
The High Impact Engineers team and community are here to support you along every step of the way.
