Why these jobs?
How a job ends up on this board, and where we might be wrong.
Look outside the Netherlands first
If you are genuinely optimising your career for impact, the strongest opportunities are usually not in the Netherlands. Much of the work on these problems is concentrated in London, the Bay Area, Washington and Nairobi. These three boards cover it better than we do, and you should look at them first.
- 80,000 HoursThe largest list of roles at organisations working on these problems, with detailed career research alongside it.
- Probably GoodRoles and career advice, with more weight on global health and animal welfare.
- EA OpportunitiesAlso internships, fellowships, research programmes and shorter projects — useful if a permanent job is not the right next step.
Not everyone can move. A partner with a job here, children in school, caring responsibilities, a residence permit — or you simply do not want to leave. That is a reasonable trade-off, not a lack of commitment. This board is built for that situation: the best options we can find in the Netherlands. We would rather say so up front than let you work it out later.
What you choose to work on matters more than almost anything else
The usual advice is to follow what you care about. We think the question before that one matters more.
Say you want your work to count for something. Climate, education, pandemics, poverty — where do you start? Most people are told these things cannot be weighed against each other, and that they should therefore pick whatever they feel most strongly about. It is well-meant advice, and it leaves the most important question unanswered.
Because problems differ enormously. Not slightly: in how many people or animals they affect, in how heavily that weighs, and in how much money and talent already goes to them. One more pair of hands adds less to a problem thousands of people work on than to one almost nobody is looking at. On that basis 80,000 Hours estimates that choosing a different problem could let you achieve over a hundred times as much.
That is not a verdict on what anyone cares about. We would like every one of these problems to get far more attention than it does. But you have one career, and the best a single person can do is find the largest gaps in what is already happening, and go and stand in one.
It is also less drastic than it sounds. It need not mean changing career: giving, political engagement and bringing others with you all count. And there is usually more room inside your current job than you would think. People in the Dutch civil service can typically move between policy files, and here that is the rule rather than the exception; people in the media choose part of what they cover. A shift like that does deserve real thought — considerably more than it usually gets.
This argument is not ours. 80,000 Hours worked it out and backed it with figures we are not going to reproduce here.
Three questions, and a fourth
For the question of which problems deserve attention we use the same framework as the rest of this site.
Importance
How large is the problem — how much suffering or loss does it involve?
Tractability
Can anything be done about it? Does extra effort produce a measurable result?
Neglectedness
How many people and how much money already go to it? Where is the next euro worth most?
Leverage
How much changes because of this particular role, over and above one person’s work?
This is what this board adds to the framework.
Which problems we think are most pressing
Five, and the choice is arguable. This is where we land when we take the three questions above seriously.
- Global health and wellbeingDisease and poverty among the poorest people alive today — and the money and policy that move it.
- Farmed animal welfareThe suffering of animals in food production, and the protein transition that could end it.
- Global catastrophic risksEvents that could kill a very large share of humanity or permanently end its prospects.
- Better futuresWhether the long-run future goes well if humanity survives: who holds power, and whose values last.
- Building the movementMore people taking these problems seriously, and more money reaching the things that work.
Climate is not among them, for a separate reason set out further down. Beyond that: this is our judgement, not a settled fact. If you think we are missing one, we would like to hear it — the board is still young enough for that to change things.
Within a problem, one approach can beat another by a wide margin
Choosing the right problem is half the question. The other half is what you actually do about it.
Two organisations can work on the same problem and get very different results from it. That gap is rarely small. In global health, the area where this has been measured most, the cost of gaining one healthy year of life varies widely between approaches that all sound equally sensible on paper.
So we look not only at the problem an organisation works on but at what it does about it. That judgement is harder than it sounds, and it is exactly why this board separates two kinds of vacancy: for one group an independent evaluator has already assessed the work, and for the other the judgement is ours, made role by role.
- Is there evidence it works?Is there research showing this approach does what it claims, or mainly a compelling story?
- Can it get bigger?Something that works for a thousand people and stalls at a million is a different kind of solution.
- Is somebody already doing it?Within one problem area, one approach can be crowded while almost nobody stands next to another.
- Does it sit on a bottleneck?The piece everything else is waiting on is worth more than the piece there are already five of.
This is 80,000 Hours' work too. They go deeper into it than we can here, with examples for each problem area.
What we mean by leverage
One word does most of the work on this board, so it is only fair to explain it.
Leverage is just this: how much can you point at the problem, besides your own hours? For most jobs the answer is nothing — you do the work, the work is the result, and that is not a criticism. But some roles command far more than their own time. They decide where money goes. They write rules a whole sector follows. They set what dozens of other people spend their year on. Or they produce an insight that is free to copy afterwards.
This is why the board carries employers who would never describe themselves as working on a global problem. An investment officer at a development bank moves more money towards poor countries with one decision than most people earn in a career. A policy officer at a regulator writes the standard thousands of companies then comply with. Neither works at a charity; both have more leverage than most people who do.
The reverse holds too, and it is the harder half: a role at an excellent organisation can have very little leverage. Generic IT or office support at a ministry doing exactly the right thing does not change what that ministry decides. Being useful to a team with leverage is not the same as having any. That is precisely the distinction we try to make, vacancy by vacancy.
- Directing moneyAn investment officer at FMO, a programme officer at a foundation, a credit analyst at an agricultural lender.
- Rules and regulationA policy officer at a ministry, a regulator at the ACM or the AFM, somebody drafting a standard.
- Research and technologyA researcher at a university or a technical institute. A finding costs almost nothing to copy and does not go away.
- Building the fieldFinding people and routing them towards the work. Finding someone better suited to a job than you are is itself a way of doing that job.
- Spreading ideasJournalism, documentary, public communication, advocacy. Reaches more people per hour than any conversation can.
- Building organisationsFounding, leading, or making the operation work — so that a hundred people together achieve more than they would apart.
- Amplifying someone with reachChief of staff or right hand to someone whose own work changes a great deal. The leverage is borrowed, but it is real.
- Earning well and giving it awayA job that uses your strengths and lets you fund other people’s work. This board has its own page for it.
Two things leverage is not
It is not a guarantee that anything works. Enormous leverage pointed at a weak solution still achieves very little. So we do not look at it alone: the first question is still whether the problem is large and neglected, and whether this approach moves it.
It says nothing about whether the job suits you. We judge the role as it would be for a competent typical holder, not for you. Whether you would be good at this and want to do it for years is a question we cannot answer for you — and it often matters more than anything we write here.
This idea is not ours. 80,000 Hours worked it out and has written far more about it than fits here, with examples from careers we do not cover. If one thing on this page is worth reading in the original, it is that.
Why is climate not here?
Not because we think climate change does not matter. It is not here because in the Netherlands it is not neglected: a great deal of money, talent and political attention already goes to it. That is good news. The problems on this board do not have that attention, which is exactly why we single them out.
Which climate work is genuinely underrated remains a good question — and a separate one. Effective Environmentalism takes it seriously and has research and a community around it. That is a better place to start than a handful of employers here would have been.
This board is still in beta
We are showing it to the Dutch community while it is unfinished, because we would rather hear what is wrong with it now than in six months.
What you will notice: the list is not complete — we follow dozens of Dutch organisations, but nowhere near all of them. The reason we write under each vacancy is our judgement, and it can simply be wrong. The problem-area explainers are not in English yet. And some vacancies close before we catch it.
None of that is a reason to wait before telling us what you think. The opposite.
How big is this board?
Right now 77 open jobs at 43 organisations. We keep the list short on purpose.
What do you make of this?
The board is still in beta, so this is exactly the moment to say what you think. A vacancy we have missed, a judgement you do not share, something that does not work — all of it helps.
Curious?
If you want to know how we arrive at this list, we run a short intro course and a newsletter. Neither costs anything.