The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far

How to choose which career path you should pursue

The purpose of these lists is to give you more ideas about high-impact career paths. There are likely many other options worth considering for your personal list that we don’t cover.

As we cover in our career guide, the overall impact of your career depends on both:

• How impactful the path is in general
• Your degree of personal fit with it

Typically, once you have some good ideas for impact, we recommend narrowing down mainly based on fit — including whether the path is likely to be sustainable and personally satisfying.

Early on in your career, it might be more helpful to pick a broader skill set to learn instead of narrowing down to just one particular path.

If you want to do a more detailed comparison of a list of options, use our career decision process.

This is also just one step in making a full career plan – see the rest of our advice on career planning, including a career plan worksheet.