7 High-Impact Skills to Learn Right Out of College
Focus on them now to have a meaningful career in a few years
When you’re fresh out of college, you naturally wonder what to do with the rest of your life. Seven years ago, that’s where I was at.
I dipped my toe in hospitality, worked for a travel agency, supported people with disabilities, and tried a few other jobs. Contrary to many peers, my primary concern wasn’t money or comfort. I wanted a job that would feel meaningful. I wanted to make a difference.
None of my first jobs felt very impactful at the time. But looking back, I congratulate myself.
Doing them helped me build a good skill set which now allows me to take on more meaningful roles. Today, I build communities through my work as a freelance writer and facilitator. That’s because, in the beginning, I prioritized experience and learning over firm career decisions.
I want to encourage you to do the same.
Why you shouldn’t obsess about the job and focus on skills
For many people, college graduation is the first time they make adult decisions and choose what’s next.
The formal education path is over. Now what?
Don’t expect yourself to make perfect career decisions right out of college. Especially if you want a career that makes a difference, you have a lot to consider.
You want to get to know yourself and discover what you really want to do. At the same time, you need to decide what pressing problems you’ll tackle in your work. And how does that relate to the pay and lifestyle you aspire to?
It’s hard to keep sight of all these factors while choosing a career.
Life choices are more complicated than they were a few decades ago. Writer David Brooks acknowledges this in his The New York Times column, naming a new phase of life that emerges nowadays. He calls it the “odyssey years” — a period when young adults do soul-searching as they try to establish what to do with their life:
“During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another. (…)
[T]his period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions. (…) Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods (…) but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.”
For many college graduates, the sense of impermanence means they have to make their own path in the world. This applies especially if you want to make a meaningful difference.
If you’re not ready to make decisions about your career just yet, you might be better off focusing on learning skills. Do that for the next few years — and you’ll build an impactful career in the decades to come.
7 highest-impact career skills, according to 80,000 Hours
80,000 Hours is a non-profit focused on helping people pursue impactful careers. They draw on a simple statistic: people spend approximately 80,000 hours of their lives at work. If you can spend that time on something that makes a difference, that’s a big win.
I recommend visiting the 80,000 Hours website after reading this article. They have great, free resources based on academic research, expert interviews, and collaboration with Oxford University in the UK.
Part of their research has focused on defining seven most impactful professional skills. They are the ones the world needs to solve the most pressing problems.
I summarized them below to give you a head start. Which of these do you want to learn?
#1: Political and bureaucratic skills
As much as you may feel reluctant to engage with politics, government agencies are some of the most impactful institutions you could work for. That’s where a lot of important decisions are made. If you want to improve state education, healthcare system, or another area of public life — they’re the place to be.
80,000 Hours’ research shows that federal employees can have significant impact even in junior roles. That’s because they have budgets to spend and meaningful decisions to make.
To work for the government — or another powerful organization, such as United Nations — you need political and bureaucratic skills. These can include:
- Building relationships with a wide range of people
- Understanding the roles and impact of different institutions
- Fluency in political culture
- Ability to evaluate problems from different perspectives.
To find out more about building the political & bureaucratic skill set, check out this article from 80,000 Hours.
#2: Organization building
There are a lot of organizations working for the collective benefit out there. Charities, non-profits, ethical businesses, associations, and think-tanks are just a few examples.
The problem is, they often don’t function as well as they could.
That’s why good organization-building skills are so impactful. If you have them, you can scale the impact of existing institutions and help deliver their objectives.
Some specific organization-building skills include (but aren’t limited to):
- Managing operations and projects
- Leading teams and facilitating their communication
- Designing and managing events
- Fundraising and budgeting.
To find out more about the organization building skill set, check out this article from 80,000 Hours.
#3: Research
At first glance, research is a skill that doesn’t guarantee any impact. To explore open-ended questions and solutions may feel like stumbling around in the dark. It’s hard to know if you’re headed in the right direction.
At the same time, research is one of the biggest bottlenecks to solving the world’s biggest problems. Some current examples are researching solutions to ensure AI safety, preventing the spread of diseases, or testing new ideas to mitigate climate change.
Not all meaningful research needs to be academic. Many important questions are answered through other methods — such as interviews, observing historical trends, or creating links between previously isolated disciplines.
These traits may condition how much you’ll enjoy research — and how good you’ll be at it:
- A predisposition to become obsessed about one particular topic
- High intelligence and analytical skills
- Openness to new ideas
- High levels of self-motivation and perseverance.
To find out more about building the research skill set, check out this article from 80,000 Hours.
#4: Communicating ideas
Even the best idea won’t get leverage if it doesn’t get communicated. As we have dozens of tech-based communication channels at our fingertips, being able to use them effectively is a true advantage.
Communicating ideas and engaging people requires you to pick an area of specialization and a medium. Most likely, you’ll specialize in 1–2 topics and one form of communication — e.g. graphic design, writing, or video. The potential impact is huge, as there’s no limit to how many people you can reach, especially online. As of October 2023, 5.3 billion people worldwide have used the Internet!
Some of the specific communication skills include:
- Writing and editing
- Video production
- Public relations & networking
- Ability to translate difficult concepts into simple language.
To find out more about building the idea communication skill set, check out this article from 80,000 Hours.
#5: Programming
The definition of programming offered by the 80,000 Hours team is simple:
Programming is just instructing computers to do novel things.
There’s power in that simplicity. Modern computers, even those we carry in our pockets, can do incredible things. When you combine good programming with an innovative ideas, you can have a significant impact on the world.
There are many routes to learn programming, from university courses to software engineer boot camps. Will you be good at and enjoy programming? Here are some indicators that you might:
- You can break down problems into logical parts
- You don’t mind testing different solutions and seeing many of them fail
- You know how to make sense of complex data
- You have high attention to detail.
To find out more about building the programming skill set, check out this article from 80,000 Hours.
#6: Experience and knowledge of influential cultures
In the coming decades, countries will need to learn how to collaborate on solving global issues. Meanwhile, there’s still a lack of understanding and cooperation between the “Western” countries and other global players.
Cross-cultural communication between the continents is where you can have an impact. The skill set required here can be quite broad. Depending on where your career goes, you may put more emphasis on learning a foreign language, public relations, business negotiations, or other skills.
Broadly speaking, some of the core competencies here include:
- An in-depth understanding of at least two different cultures
- Speaking two or more languages fluently
- The ability to work with culturally diverse teams
- Networking, negotiating, and social skills.
To find out more about building intercultural skills, check out this article from 80,000 Hours.
#7: Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem
Finally, you can make an impact by dedicating yourself to a specialized field of knowledge. This means becoming an expert in an area that holds a lot of importance for humanity’s biggest issues.
80,000 Hours highlight these fields as particularly relevant:
- Subfields of biology relevant to pandemic prevention
- AI hardware
- Equipment and new technology engineering
- Economics
- History
- Knowledge of China
- Law
To find out more about building specialist knowledge, check out this article from 80,000 Hours.
Which skills will you learn?
Entering the job market is a lot trickier now than it was a few decades ago.
On top of whether you’re going to succeed, enjoy, and sustain yourself from a job, you also want to consider your career’s social impact. If you can choose a meaningful job now — I’d say just go for it. We need more people thinking about their work as a way to make a difference.
However, it may be hard to decide what you want to do right out of college. If you’re unsure about your career path yet, consider building one or more of these high-impact skills first:
- Political and bureaucratic skills
- Organization building
- Research
- Communicating ideas
- Programming
- Experience and knowledge of influential cultures
- Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem.
There’s a good chance this will be the beginning of an exciting, purposeful career.
If you want to grow as a person while becoming an agent of change, join CivLead! There are a few ways you can get involved:
