What are the highest-impact opportunities in the effective altruism community right now? We surveyed leaders at 17 key organizations to learn more about what skills they need and how they would trade-off receiving donations against hiring good staff. It’s a more extensive and up-to-date version of the survey we did last year.

The most in-demand roles are researchers and managers, but we’d also like to highlight increasing demand for subject specialists, especially experts in policy, biology/life sciences, economics, and mathematics. Many people in the community think that these skillsets are needed to solve the highest-priority problems, but they’re also in short supply in the community.

We’d also like to highlight the significant demand for people doing operations, administration and executive assistant work. These staff do things like create hiring processes, design office spaces to maximise productivity, and manage budget tracking processes. These roles are vital for running all of the organizations surveyed, but many are not able to hire as many good candidates for these roles as they would like. In particular, since this work is a little unglamorous, we think its value gets underappreciated, which makes these roles especially high-impact. We intend to write more about these roles in the future.

Read the full research article by Robert Wiblin about nonprofit talent from 80000hours.org