Courses
Make your high-impact career pivot

Make your high-impact career pivot

Join an online bootcamp to identify high-impact careers that match your skills, then build momentum for your next steps with exercises, advisor feedback, and peer accountability.
15 min application | Various bootcamp dates running April-June
No fees
Online
4-day or 4-week options
20-30 hours total
Careers that actually improve the world
Graduates of our bootcamps have gone on to work at organisations tackling the world’s most important problems:
GWWC
SecureBio
New Roots Institute
Centre for Effective Altruism
ERA
Center for Reducing Suffering
Probably Good

Transition into careers that actually improve the world

Some careers have 10x or even 100x the impact of others; we want to help you find the top most impactful few. You’ll get:

Clarity on your direction

Identify which paths, causes, or roles to aim for, and find opportunities that match your skills.

A network for impact-focused careers

Meet experts in relevant fields and get feedback from other participants with similar backgrounds.

Take action

Figure out how to move forward and work through the obstacles in your way.

Who this course is for

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 in some domain.

You're impact-driven

You want to apply your abilities to solving the world’s most important 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.

Work in operations or organisational leadership?

We also run a bootcamp with content, speakers, and participants focused more specifically on operations and organisational leadership. Here are our two formats:
Any accomplished professionals
Meet professionals with a range of expertise. Our alumni include tech founders, policy makers, marketers, software engineers, and more.
Planned date options:
  • 11-12th & 18-19th April (weekends)
  • 20th-23rd April (weekdays)
  • (We expect to add more!)
Operations & organisational leadership
If you’ve built systems, scaled teams, or made organisations run better, this bootcamp provides a more tailored experience.
Planned date options:
  • 2nd-3rd & 9-10th May (weekends)
  • 11-14th May (weekdays)
  • (We may add more!)

How it works

15-minute application

Our form asks you about your background and goals. No interview. You’ll hear back within a few days of the deadline. Onboarding takes about 1 hour, and additional prep activities are optional.

Move forward with structure and support

The program is built around making progress 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. We share frameworks, templates, and external readings to help you make progress.
Meet people
Group calls, standups, and 1:1s with the other participants, plus discussion on our Slack.
Get feedback
Our advisors provide written & verbal 1:1 feedback on your plans and opportunities.

Hear from career pivoters

Hear from accomplished professionals who have made the leap from careers in business, government, and tech into work that tackles the biggest challenges of our time.
The speakers from our last bootcamps were:
Anna Weldon
Anna Weldon
Chief Operating Officer at the Centre for Effective Altruism. Former Director of Human Resources at a ~$100M annual revenue, 1,000+ employee sustainable fashion company.
Abraham Rowe
Abraham Rowe
Director of Operations at the Centre for Governance of AI. Former founder of a nonprofit operations consultancy and fractional COO.
Rebecca Rolapp
Rebecca Rolapp
Operations Associate at the Market Shaping Accelerator. Former Senior Product Manager at BidX1 and Technical Project Manager at Tesla.
Jayasimha Nugehalli
Jayasimha Nugehalli
Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder of Global Food Partners. Former country lead for Humane Society International India and campaigner at PETA.
Kathleen Perell
Kathleen Perell
Chief of Staff to the COO at the Centre for Effective Altruism. Former corporate lawyer at GrubHub and major law firms, then General Counsel at Effective Ventures.
Devon Fritz
Devon Fritz
Author and ex-COO at Ambitious Impact. Former software engineer of over a decade turned nonprofit co-founder.
Rika Gabriel
Rika Gabriel
Recruiter at the Centre for Effective Altruism. Former Outreach Manager at Ambitious Impact and community builder in the Philippines.
Joe Maddens
Joe Maddens
Managing Director at Consultants for Impact. Former consultant at McKinsey and CEO of an Independent Consulting Firm.
Note that our last bootcamps were focused specifically on operations and organisational management; we will arrange speakers from a wider range of role types and backgrounds for upcoming cohorts.

We offer two formats to fit your schedule

Both formats cover the same content – choose what works best for you.
Weekend Bootcamp
Two consecutive full weekends, 5-8 hours per day
11-12th & 18-19th April
Progress your high-impact career pivot without taking time off work
Weekday Bootcamp
Four consecutive weekdays, 5-8 hours per day
20th-23rd April
Ideal if you can take a week off for focused, rapid progress

What you'll do

Day 1

Make the most of your strengths

You'll build your ‘bootcamp baseline’, highlighting your achievements and how they translate to high-impact work. You’ll build out your plan A, plan B, and backup plan, then get feedback from a CEA advisor, a tailored AI bot, and peers to help you beat your baseline and improve your plans. (See our day 1 content from our last program here)
Day 2

Focus your next steps

You'll shortlist cause areas using the Importance, Neglectedness, Tractability framework (the same tool researchers use to compare problems like AI risk vs. global health), compare role types with a Weighted Factor Model, or use the SELF framework (significance, effectiveness, leverage, fit) to spot overlooked opportunities.
Day 3

Take action

You'll draft and refine actual applications or project outlines using our curated advice on what works for high-impact hiring, or run quick career experiments to test whether a path is right for you. Peers and advisors will give you feedback on your drafts and help you troubleshoot blockers.
Day 4

Make it real

You'll finalize your ‘career catalyst’: a submitted application, networking pitch, or action plan. You'll set concrete goals and get matched with an accountability buddy for weekly check-ins.

Testimonials from previous bootcamps

“I now see at least two paths I hadn’t seriously considered or had written off as beyond my capabilities. The structure and peer energy have helped a lot with motivation.”
— Joe
“My next steps feel clearer, I have a few specific opportunities to pursue, and I feel more energised to do this. I've also expanded my backup options and have more awareness of some unconventional paths to take.”
— Yi Peng
“The program has helped me develop a specific impact-focused plan that seems likely to lead to real, concrete opportunities. I have a much clearer idea of which causes I'd like to focus on, and as a result, which types of organizations and resources I should target.”
— Robert
“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.”
— Cibeles
“The career bootcamp provided excellent curated resources and the chance to learn from a diverse group of smart, ambitious people. The program shifted my thinking about high-impact careers and I learned that I don't need to have my next ten steps figured out to take the first one.”
— Raminta
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8.9/10 average rating

Surveyed at the end of our most recent 4-day bootcamp: “How likely are you to recommend this program to a friend who's interested in having a big impact?”

Meet the team

Jamie Harris
Jamie Harris
Jamie is the Courses Project lead at CEA. After graduating with a first-class history degree from Oxford, he taught history before pivoting to research at a think tank investigating long-term social and technological change. He later co-founded Animal Advocacy Careers and served as Managing Director at Leaf, and has worked as a grantmaker at the EA Infrastructure Fund.
Cian Mullarkey
Cian Mullarkey
Cian works on product and strategy on the courses team at CEA. Previously, he led the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative Summer Fellowship. He studied Mathematics and Economics at Trinity College Dublin and NYU, graduating with a first-class degree.
Brendan Chan
Brendan Chan
After starting his career as a high school math teacher, Brendan went on to work at Google for nine years on various global operations, education, and social impact teams. He has worked for various nonprofit organizations, political campaigns, and a family office focused on education philanthropy. In 2025, he completed his Doctorate of Education Leadership from Harvard.
Caroline Chitongo
Caroline Chitongo
Caroline has spent a few years on AI safety field building, running fellowships, courses, and discussion groups, and supporting participants in taking their next steps in the field. She has facilitated courses at BlueDot Impact, reviews applications for MATS, and is independently upskilling in computer science, supported by career transition funding from Coefficient Giving.
Cameron King
Cameron King
Cameron has founded and scaled multiple organizations from the ground up. He co-founded Animal Advocacy Africa and Hive, two organisations building a collaborative animal advocacy movement, and was Head of Operations at Credence Institute. Cameron also ran an e-commerce business and has completed two incubation programs with Ambitious Impact.

Connections to partner organisations

We partner with impact-focused careers services to support you with your next steps after the bootcamp, such as pre-approved access to follow-up 1:1 advising.
80k
Probably Good
High Impact Professionals
Animal Advocacy Careers
Successif

FAQ

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?
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. Effective work on these problems constitutes some of the top most useful contributions to help society and others that anyone could make.
Some of your career options probably have 100x the impact of others, and we want to help you find those top, most impactful few. Our own views on the best opportunities are formed using tools like the Importance, Neglectedness, Tractability framework, which we’ll introduce in the bootcamp.
You can read examples of experienced professionals’ transitions into high-impact careers from the Effective Altruism Forum’s Career Conversations Week:
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. In fact, we’ve found that participants who haven’t heard or read much about effective altruism before have tended to gain more from the bootcamp.
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.
If you’re already deeply familiar with effective altruism, you may benefit from the accountability and network provided by the bootcamp, but you’ll likely find that you’ve encountered many of the ideas or similar resources before.
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.
We have a version which is open to accomplished professionals from any background. We are also offering a version focused specifically on operations professionals & organizational leaders. We expect strong applicants for the ops-specific program to come from backgrounds like chiefs of staff, COOs, project managers, product managers, entrepreneurs, recruitment, finance, and business development. The application form is the same for both formats, you can just let us know about your background and preference when you apply.
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 ask on the application form about other dates you are available (in April to June 2026), in case we have demand and staff capacity to run further cohorts. We can’t make any promises here though. If you’re interested, best to apply now.