Should students do a job they love?
When starting out, should you go for salary or job satisfaction? A new advice service is here to help, says Tom Ough
For many parents, it’s a time of year that can feel like a vindication. As university offers roll in for their children, so too does the prospect of safe passage towards a respectable career. Will they choose something lucrative in medicine, law or finance – something to set them up for life? But what if you think your child is mapping out the wrong career path?
According to career advisers, young people are increasingly interested in finding “fulfilling” jobs in which they can do good and enrich the lives of others as well as their own, rather than maximise their take-home pay. In the process, conventional wisdom on what makes a good career is being torn up.
Roman Duda is part of the six-strong team at 80,000 Hours, an ethical careers advisory service founded by Oxford University students in 2011. Named after the number of hours worked over the average career, it helps bright students explore the ethical potential of popular graduate jobs – from management consulting and software engineering to founding tech start-ups – while also suggesting ways to maximise a salary from more “selfless” paths within nursing and the non-profit sector.
“‘Follow your passion’ is an easy thing for an undergraduate to hear,” says Duda, “but we think that advice is incomplete and misleading.”
He explains that the mantra misses important factors in establishing a satisfying career, such as having supportive colleagues, and points to research suggesting that, rather than discovering our passion over time, we need to try things before we know what we enjoy and what we might excel at.
The 80,000 Hours charity, which is backed by Y-combinator, a Silicon
Valley start-up accelerator, reports that more than
1,800 people have so far changed career paths because of its advice
– and that those it has schooled have taken jobs that have enabled them to pledge £23 million to charity. Its online career guide has now been turned into a book, 80,000 Hours: Find a Fulfilling Career that Does Good.
In the book, Ben Todd, the group’s founder, shows how a good salary can be the backbone of a philanthropic career, and outlines four different pathways for those wanting a selfless but lucrative working life.
The first pathway is “earning to give”: for particularly driven and able individuals, jobs in areas such as quantitative finance might allow them to earn huge sums of which they could then give a proportion to charity.
According to 80,000 Hours, earning to give is only appropriate for individuals who are already interested in such careers, and many people will be better suited to the second pathway: advocacy. Todd cites the example of Viktor Zdhanov, the Soviet virologist who lobbied the World Health Organisation to eliminate smallpox. The disease killed around 400 million people in the 20th century alone, many more than by both world wars put together, and it was extinguished with his help. Few of us can hope to have such an impact on our society, but, says Todd, politicians, journalists and think-tank workers are well-placed to circulate important ideas.
Those who are more academically minded might be a good fit for the third pathway: research. Here, they might make a difference by working to improve healthcare or technology – all the while being paid handsomely for their efforts. Finally, Todd recommends direct work – jobs in which you help people day-to-day. Under this umbrella come traditional “fulfilling” careers such as aid work, social work, and jobs with charities. All very worthy, but there’s a caveat: how irreplaceable are you in this field?
That question is exemplified by Gregory Lewis, who went to Cambridge to fulfil his dream of becoming a doctor, before beginning to have doubts. How much difference could he really make? Would the world be much better off for having a Dr Lewis rather than a Dr Bloggs?
The good he would do practising as a doctor, Gregory realised, would be far outweighed by the good he could do donating a small proportion of his salary to cost-effective charities fighting to eradicate diseases in sub-saharan Africa.
Having qualified in 2013, Lewis, 28, works as a public health doctor – and donates a quarter of his £30,000 salary to charity.
According to 80,000 Hours, there are other counter-intuitive ideas in the new rules of ethical careers. The exhortation against “selling-out” to the corporate world is given short shrift.
“We recommend some graduates spend a few years working in the corporate sector before they transition into roles with more direct social impact,” says Duda. “This is because, compared with starting your career in a non-profit, working in the corporate sector often gives you better training and opens up a larger number of longer-term career options.”