Courses
Make your high-impact career pivot
Make your high-impact career pivot
Join a free 4-day online bootcamp to identify high-impact career paths that match your skills, apply to opportunities, and build a network to accelerate your career pivot.
Apply by September 14th
30 min application | Runs Sept 20-21 & 27-28 or Oct 6-9
No fees
Online
6-8 hours per day
4 days, weekday and weekend options
For accomplished professionals
What you'll get
Evaluate your options
We help you decide which types of roles to aim for, suggest high-impact opportunities aligned with your skills, and challenge blind spots in your thinking.
Build your network for impact-focused roles
Meet other experienced professionals who are pivoting their careers to working on the world's most pressing problems in their next role.
Feedback on CVs
Draft, get feedback, and iterate on CVs and application materials; we’ll support you in leveraging your skills to tackle pressing problems.
Real progress — not just ideas
Find roles, projects, or paths where your expertise is most needed, then send applications, make pitches, or network with employers.
For accomplished professionals
Most participants are mid-career with 5+ years' experience, but it's not required.
You have a proven track-record
Have developed skills and achieved strong results. Our alumni include tech founders, consultants, and nonprofit leaders.
You're impact-driven
You want to apply your abilities to solving pressing problems and are open-minded about the best ways to help others.
You're action-oriented
You're ready to commit time and energy to taking meaningful steps, not just thinking about them.
Alumni of our previous programs work at
(The bootcamp is new. These examples are from our Introductory EA program and other courses.)
Choose your schedule
We offer two formats to fit your schedule.
Weekend Bootcamp
Two consecutive full weekends
September 20–21 & September 27–28
Progress your high-impact career pivot without taking time off work
Weekday Bootcamp
Four consecutive weekdays
Monday to Thursday, October 6-9
Ideal if you can take a week off for focused, rapid progress
Both formats cover the same content - choose what works best for you. We may run additional program dates, depending on demand and staff capacity.
What you'll do
Day 1
Scout high-impact paths
Shortlist cause areas and opportunities aligned with your skills
Day 2
Focus and prioritize
Choose top directions and specific roles to pursue.
Day 3
Take action
Fire off applications, send intro requests, or scope out a project
Day 4
Make it real
Address any blockers, set clear goals, and create accountability for ongoing progress
You'll work through targeted exercises, collaborate with other participants, and take concrete action on your career goals. You can see the independent activities content drafts here, though we may make further edits and improvements.
How it helps
“Being surrounded by others who consistently showed up and engaged meaningfully helped me stay accountable. The consistent pacing and back-to-back assignments created a rhythm that made feedback both timely and relevant. It’s short, intense, and gives you a focused burst of momentum. You’ll come away with a few practical tools to help clarify your thinking about your next steps and job search direction.”
— Cibeles
“The most valuable aspect of the Career Bootcamp was the accountability it provided. Having to carve out substantial, uninterrupted time blocks for deep thinking was exactly what I needed for improving my career transition strategy and application materials. The bootcamp's structured framework and carefully curated reading materials made these reflection processes incredibly productive and focused.”
— Eva
“Connecting with people with such diverse capabilities—many of whom generously offered their time to provide feedback on my communication style, application strategy, and overall job search—was incredibly valuable. Hearing about approaches and experiences I hadn't previously considered helped me feel less isolated. Most importantly, having the space to reflect on my values, strengths, and career interests allowed me to approach my search with much greater clarity and intention.”
— Aisha
Meet the team
Jamie Harris
After graduating with a first-class degree in history from the University of Oxford, Jamie taught for several years, before realising that he could achieve more impact elsewhere. He pivoted his career, becoming a researcher at a think tank investigating long-term social and technological change. From there, he co-founded Animal Advocacy Careers and Leaf, two nonprofits working to help individuals make positive impacts over the course of their careers. He has also worked as a grantmaker at the EA Infrastructure Fund and Macroscopic Ventures.
Cian Mullarkey
Cian works on strategy and operations for the courses team at the Centre for Effective Altruism. Previously, he ran the Effective Altruism groups at Trinity College Dublin and New York University, where he graduated with a first class degree in Mathematics and Economics. He also worked as the team lead for the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative Summer Fellowship.
We partner with impact-focused careers services to support you with your next steps after the bootcamp
FAQ
What will the program involve day-to-day?
The program is built around making progress every day through three core activities:
- Independent activities: You'll work through exercises and resources designed to help you clarify, pursue, and land your next high-impact opportunity.
- Meet people: Calls with the other participants and opportunities for discussion on our Slack.
- Get feedback: Give and get feedback on your plans and drafts from peers and our team.
Why is the bootcamp free?
Our donors cover the cost because they are keen to support talented people to work on the world’s most pressing problems.
We want to help you land opportunities that have unusually important and positive effects on others, following from the principles of effective altruism; our content and staff will be both opinionated and open-minded about how you can best achieve that, and we hope you will be too.
What do you mean by a high-impact career? What are some examples of successful pivots?
We mean careers that make an unusually large, positive contribution; focusing on the world’s most pressing problems and the most promising interventions to tackle them, identified through reason and evidence. Some of your career options probably have 100x the impact of others, and we want to help you find those top, most impactful few.
You can read examples of experienced professionals’ transitions into high-impact careers from the Effective Altruism Forum’s Career Conversations Week:
- Martyn James: From Google to co-founding a global health charity
- Kathleen Perell: From corporate law to nonprofit operations
- Patrick Gruban: From startups and consulting to EA community building
- Cameron Holmes: From finance software to AI x-risk research management
You can find more examples in the book Moral Ambition and on the 80,000 Hours podcast.
Do I need to know about effective altruism?
You need to be interested in making a positive impact through your career, and open-minded to unconventional methods for how best to achieve that, but you don’t need to be familiar with effective altruism.
We may ask you to read, watch, or listen to some materials in the runup to the program so that you can benefit fully from it.
If you’d find it more useful to carefully explore effective altruism and think through the best opportunities for positive impact, we recommend our introductory or in-depth EA programs instead. For a cohort-based career planning program with a longer timeframe, we also recommend High Impact Professionals’ 6-week Impact Accelerator Program.
What are the requirements to participate?
This is an immersive experience requiring 5-8 hours per day. You will need to ensure you can clear your schedule to maximize your progress on your high-impact career pivot. This time estimate includes all the required activities – the independent, interactive, and iterative elements, not just the virtual calls (which will only last 1-2 hours per day).
You also need a reliable internet connection, English language skills sufficient to constructively engage in group discussions, and to be over 18 years of age. Entry may also be competitive; see “Who it’s for” for what we’ll be looking for.
When are the interactive calls? Will it work for my timezone?
We expect to run two calls per day; one at 8am GMT and one at 4pm GMT. This should work for all timezones, as long as you genuinely take time off to clear your schedule; it will be morning for the Americas, evening for East Asia or Oceania, and the areas in between will have a choice.
Is this for me if I’m still unsure about changing careers?
Yes — you’ll gain clarity on whether a pivot makes sense, and what kind of change is actually possible. We’ve found that people who hadn’t yet started actively seeking out new opportunities were among those who benefited most from participating in our programs.
But we expect participants to take meaningful steps to explore their options in the program.
Will I get a certificate?
Yes, but more importantly, you’ll leave the program with useful outputs, like an improved CV that better demonstrates how your skills and experience can be leveraged for impact and translated into a new context.
Are there other dates available?
We’re planning to run a weekend bootcamp on September 20–21 & September 27–28 and a weekday bootcamp on Monday to Thursday, October 6–9, but are hoping to also run an earlier program in late August or early September; so it’s better to get your application in as soon as possible. We may also run additional dates in October. We ask on the application form about other dates you are available, in case we have demand and staff capacity to run further cohorts. We can’t make any promises here though. And we’re not yet sure if it will run again afterwards; if you’re interested, best to apply now.
4-day online bootcamp
