80000 Hours Career Quiz: What It Is and Where It Went

80,000 Hours is a London nonprofit, founded in 2011, that gives free career advice to people who want their work to help with the world's biggest problems. The name is the rough number of hours a person spends working over a lifetime, per its Wikipedia entry. The group writes its name with a comma, but its older page titles say 80000 Hours, which is also how most people type the search. Over the years it has built several tools, and "the quiz" can mean any of them. Here they are, one line each, so you can spot yours.

• The 2015 career recommender. A few questions, about three minutes' worth, that suggested careers with a large social impact. The recommender tool is retired; its 2015 launch post still loads.
• The career quiz. Today's version, built into the 80,000 Hours AI advisor app. The group describes it as an AI-assisted quiz that finds careers where you can make the biggest difference.
• The problem quiz. Six questions that filter the group's list of the world's most pressing problems. It picks a cause, not a job.
• The career planning tool. A two-part written workbook that ends with your own plan. Nothing gets a score.
• The AI advisor. A chat assistant for career questions, alongside free one-on-one calls with the group's human advisers, which you apply for.
• The job board. Openings at organizations working on AI safety and the other problems on the group's list.

Two related searches come up alongside this one. The first is the annual career review, a yearly check-in worksheet the group once offered: its old address now forwards to the career reviews, write-ups on 20-plus high-impact paths, so for a yearly check-in, rerun the planning tool below. The second is effective altruism, the movement that asks how to do the most good with limited time and money. 80,000 Hours grew up inside it, and its problem quiz still ranks promoting effective altruism near the top of its list.

Is the 80,000 Hours career quiz still available?

Yes, at a new address. Most older guides link to the 2015 launch post for the career recommender, which promised to ask you a few questions and then tell you in which careers you could have the greatest social impact. The recommender tool is retired; its 2015 launch post still loads. We checked on 26 September 2026: type 80000hours.org/career-quiz into a browser and it forwards you to the career quiz inside the AI advisor. The idea is the same: answer questions about yourself, get pointed at careers where, by the group's reckoning, you could do the most good. If you took the old recommender years ago, take the new one fresh. The group's focus has moved since 2015, and its job board now leads with AI safety, so an old result is out of date.

Which global problem should you work on? The 80,000 Hours problem quiz

The 80,000 Hours problem quiz is easy to mistake for a career quiz. It asks six questions and uses your answers to filter the group's ranked list of pressing global problems down to the ones that match your views. The output is a cause to work on. Choosing a role inside that cause, and checking your fit for it, comes later, and the quiz leaves both to you. If you have a cause already, skip it. If you are torn between two or three, it shows you in minutes how the group would rank them, and why.

The 80000 Hours career quiz and every tool around it run on self-report. You answer questions about yourself and your views, and the tool sorts options using the group's own research on which problems and paths matter most. None of them tests a skill, times you, or compares your answers with other people's. The 2015 recommender came closest: it asked about your abilities and characteristics, then emailed you its suggestions. But you rated those abilities yourself. Nothing was tested or scored against anyone else. That is on purpose. 80,000 Hours ranks careers mostly by the good they could do, and it asks you to judge your own fit later, by trying things out.

Even the 2015 launch post was upfront about this. Its authors wrote that they planned to change the questions to more precisely measure people's key abilities. The recommender was a starting filter, and they said so.

How many questions are in the 80,000 Hours quiz?

The current 80,000 Hours career quiz has 10 questions, and the problem quiz is billed as six. We took both on 26 September 2026. The career quiz showed its count on the start screen, and the problem quiz ran to a seventh question, on how soon AI could do most jobs. Here is every tool side by side, with the test types people weigh against them.

Tool

Questions

Time

Cost

What you get

2015 career recommender (retired)

A short set on your abilities and characteristics

About 3 minutes

Free

Suggested high-impact careers, emailed to you

Career quiz, in the AI advisor

10: pick one, tick all that apply, or a 1-to-7 scale, each with an optional note

About 5 minutes

Free

A personalised profile of high-impact paths

Problem quiz

6 by its own count; 7 in our run

Under 5 minutes

Free

The group's top ten problems, re-ranked with scores, emailed if you like

Career planning tool

Writing prompts in two parts

Twenty minutes to an afternoon

Free

Your own plan with A, B, and Z options, plus a next move

Holland or RIASEC interest test

Usually 30 to 60 ratings

10 to 20 minutes

Often free

Your lean across six interest types

Personality test

Usually 50 to 120 ratings

10 to 30 minutes

Free to about $50

Broad traits like sociability and orderliness

Pigment

Pairs of statements, pick one

Roughly 18 minutes

$79.99

A report on your working habits and the roles they match

What the career quiz asks. In our own words:

• Where you are in your career, from student to more than 15 years of work.
• How sure you are about which global problem matters most, on a scale of 1 to 7.
• Which skills are your strongest, such as writing, working with data, or managing people, and which kinds of work give you energy.
• How willing you would be to retrain in depth, for example through a technical degree.

What the problem quiz asks. Most questions are agree, unsure, or disagree:

• Can a small group, running a focused campaign, change how society feels about a moral issue for good?
• How likely is it that humans go extinct in the next 50 years: over 15%, 1 to 15%, or under 1%?
• To do the most good, should you back risky, high-payoff bets like research or advocacy over proven ones like vaccines?

After each answer the quiz shows the list moving, so you see which of your views shifts which problem. The 2015 recommender's questions were never archived, so we can't show them. The planning tool has no fixed count, because it is a list of prompts you answer in writing. Its first part checks that you have the guide's key ideas down, and its second has you set out A, B, and Z options: your top option, a few nearby alternatives, and a fallback if things go badly.

For interest types, the government's O*NET list of the six interest areas defines each one in plain terms, and our Holland Code career test guide explains how to read the letters. For broad traits, see the Big 5 career test. Our look at the most accurate career test weighs the evidence on all of them.

One practical tip. Do the quizzes first and the workbook last. The quizzes take minutes and give you something to write about. The workbook is where you decide.

Your 80000 Hours career quiz results arrive as a short set of directions: kinds of careers the group rates highly for impact, with links to read more about each. The problem quiz gives you a cause area instead. Both are useful. They turn a vague wish to do good into a few named options, and each option comes with a long, free write-up from the group's research.

What the results do not cover is you as a worker. They cannot say which of those directions matches how you reason, make calls, and handle people, or which would still hold your interest in year five. Take a made-up case. Priya is 36 and has spent ten years as a product manager at a software company. Her results point to AI policy and to operations work at a research group. Both are sensible. One means long reading, careful writing, and slow progress through committees. The other means running many small things at once and fixing whatever broke this morning. The quiz treats them as two good options, and for the world they may be. For Priya, one of them may fit how she works and the other may not.

Do career tests work?

Not well, by the group's own account. In its chapter on how to find the right career for you, 80,000 Hours reprints results from a 2022 reanalysis of the tests employers use to pick staff. Tests that score your match with Holland's six types of interest correlated 0.24 with later job performance. Structured interviews, the best method in the table, reached 0.42. Job knowledge tests came in at 0.40, work samples at 0.33, and years of experience at a mere 0.07. The chapter's verdict is blunt: "all of these tests are pretty bad." It also recalls a 2020 UK government career test that told many people to become lock-keepers or professional boxers. So the group behind the quiz agrees that a quiz cannot pick your career. Its own quiz makes no attempt to forecast your performance. It narrows where to look.

The format of a test matters too. Most interest inventories ask you to rate yourself on a scale, and on a scale it is easy to mark yourself high on everything that sounds good. Forced-choice tests make you pick between two statements instead, so rating yourself top on every trait isn't possible. Two meta-analyses by Jesús Salgado and colleagues, pooling decades of workplace studies (European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 2014; Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 2015), found that forced-choice personality measures, especially the kind that compare statements against each other, tracked job performance better than rating-scale ones. That is evidence about a format, not a promise about any one product. It is why Pigment uses forced choice, and Pigment still does not claim to predict how you will perform.

What is personal fit?

80,000 Hours defines personal fit as "how well you expect to perform compared to the typical person in the field, if you work at it." It argues fit matters more than people think, because output varies so much between people. One study it cites found that about half of the contributions in a field came from the top 10% of performers. Fit also shapes your satisfaction and the skills you build. To find it, the group says to test rather than introspect: make best guesses, list what would change your mind, then run cheap tests. Read about a field for 2 to 5 hours, talk to people in it for 2 to 20 hours, do a project of 1 to 4 weeks, and only then commit to an internship or a degree.

As a career quiz for social impact careers, the 80000 Hours career quiz has few rivals. It costs nothing, takes minutes, and every result links to deep research. Who benefits most depends on how well you already know your own working habits.

A strong fit: people who already want their work to count

If you have decided that doing good is the main aim and you need somewhere to point that wish, start here. The quiz and the problem quiz will hand you a short list and a reading pile, and the advisers offer free one-on-one calls you can apply for. Students and recent graduates with no fixed path yet tend to gain the most, since they have the widest range of options still open.

A weaker fit: people still working out how they work best

If you are not sure yet what kind of work you do well, the quiz will not tell you. It assumes you will find out by trying. That is sound advice, but trial projects take weeks each, and a list of five impact careers could take a year to test. The same goes if you want a mainstream career with no impact angle: the quiz is built around the group's priorities, and its job board reflects them.

Mid-career people weighing a move into impact work

80,000 Hours writes for people further along too. If that is you, you bring ten or fifteen years of evidence about how you work. The quiz asks for only a line or two of it. Write it down before you pick a path: which projects went well, which drained you, and why. Our career test for adults guide covers tools built for readers at that stage. A structured measure helps here, because memory is kind to the past.

The 80000 Hours career quiz tells you where to aim. A personal fit test, a structured look at how you work, helps you choose among the directions it gives you. Here is how the two fit into the group's own method.

Finding the right career for you, the 80,000 Hours way, with one step added

Pair the impact tools with one structured look at how you work, then run the group's own method. In practice:

• Aim. Take the problem quiz if you have no cause yet, then the career quiz. Keep three or four directions.
• Take stock of how you work. This is the step the group's method leaves to you. Get it on paper before you guess.
• Guess and list what you don't know. Use the planning tool to rank your directions and name what would change the ranking.
• Test cheaply. Read, then talk to people in the field, then do a short project, as the personal fit chapter lays out. The 80,000 Hours job board is a good place to find the organizations to talk to.

Pigment is built for the second step. It uses a forced-choice format: each question shows two statements and you pick the one closer to you, so rating yourself a ten on every trait isn't an option. The report, 36 pages long, starts with your strengths, then the style and type of work you tend toward, how you pair up with colleagues unlike you, and a career section that lists roles your profile points to and says why. Styles are tendencies, not boxes. Nothing in it forecasts how you will perform, and by 80,000 Hours' evidence, nothing does that well. What it does is give you better first guesses and a checklist for each trial. It draws on research into how well people match their work settings, and a study of its own questions is under way, with results not yet out. Its users skew mid-career, with a decade or so of jobs already on their record.

If purpose is what pulled you to 80,000 Hours in the first place, our pieces on career and purpose and how to find a meaningful job go further. For the wider field of tests, start at our career test guide.

Go Beyond the 80,000 Hours Career Quiz

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