You want your work to matter more. Where do you start?

There’s a funny thing about deciding you want the next part of your career to contribute to something that matters. It sounds as though it should narrow your options down. Quite often, it does the opposite.

Take climate change. There’s energy, food, transport, buildings, finance, agriculture, policy, nature, supply chains, technology and plenty more. There are startups building things, campaigners trying to change laws, investors deciding what gets funded, researchers trying to work out what works, and organisations helping people use solutions that already exist. Somewhere inside all of that are thousands of jobs, many of which probably don’t have “climate” anywhere in the title.

The same thing happens with health, education, poverty, housing, biodiversity or the way new technology is changing the world. These aren’t really career sectors. They’re big problems, with people approaching them from lots of different directions.

Which means there’s another way to start looking. Pick a problem, and follow the work.

One problem, lots of ways to work on it

Take housing. One organisation might be building homes. Another is campaigning for changes to planning policy. Someone else is helping people at risk of homelessness, financing affordable housing, improving the energy efficiency of old buildings or researching why an intervention that worked brilliantly in one city barely made a dent somewhere else. They could all reasonably say they work on housing. Their actual work might have very little in common.

Health is the same. There are people developing new treatments, getting existing treatments to more people, funding research, lobbying governments, improving health systems, changing public behaviour and trying to prevent people becoming ill in the first place. Follow almost any big problem for a while and it starts opening up into lots of smaller, more specific bits of work.

That’s the interesting thing about starting with the problem. You stop looking for the handful of jobs that look obviously meaningful and start noticing all the work that has to happen around it.

Someone interested in climate might go in assuming policy is the obvious route and end up fascinated by the companies trying to make heat pumps cheaper and easier to install. A broad interest in global health might lead to vaccine supply chains. Someone worried about the future of AI could find their way into research, regulation, international cooperation, communications or the work involved in building organisations around all of those things.

There’s no need to know which one is right at the beginning. First, it helps to see what is actually there.

Have a look at the work, not just the mission

Mission statements tend to make organisations working on the same problem sound quite similar. Get a little closer and the differences become much more useful.

Have a look at what they actually do. Read about a project or programme. Browse their jobs. Look at the people who work there and what their backgrounds are. If there’s an interview with someone on the team, read it. Annual reports can be useful too, although there’s no need to turn Saturday afternoon into an exam.

The aim is simply to understand enough about the work for the big label to start breaking down. “Climate” becomes home energy, carbon removal, food systems or clean transport. “Health” becomes biomedical research, vaccine delivery or mental-health provision. “Education” might become teacher recruitment, early-years support or helping schools use technology better.

Once the work gets more specific, so do the careers around it.

Behind most ambitious missions there is also a surprising amount of work that looks fairly familiar. Organisations need people to recruit teams, manage money, build partnerships, negotiate contracts, run programmes, develop products and explain complicated ideas to people who need to understand them.

A recent role on Escape’s job board is a good example. The Francis Crick Institute carries out biomedical research into illnesses including cancer, heart disease and infectious diseases. It advertised for a senior commercial lawyer to work on agreements, investments, partnerships and transactions, and explicitly said applicants didn’t need to come from charity, research or life sciences. What the Crick needed for that particular piece of its work was serious legal experience.

That one job doesn’t prove anything grand about career change. It’s just a nice reminder of how many different kinds of work sit behind a mission.

See what catches your attention

This is probably a more useful point to bring your own career into the picture.

There might be jobs that feel immediately familiar. There might be work you’ve never considered before. Perhaps the interesting thing isn’t the obvious connection to your current profession at all, but a part of your experience that has quietly become useful over the years.

An account manager might know an enormous amount about getting large organisations to agree to things. Someone in operations may have spent years making messy systems work. A marketer might be unusually good at helping people understand a complicated subject. Someone in product could know how to get from an interesting idea to something people will actually use.

That gives you something much more specific to investigate than “could I work in climate?” It might be a connection worth pursuing, or it might turn out to be completely wrong once you get closer.

There’s also no prize for forcing a fit. Sometimes a field is fascinating and the jobs aren’t. Sometimes a role needs years of specialist knowledge. Sometimes the work is possible but the salary, hours or location make it a poor fit. Finding that out is part of the process too.

Then speak to somebody who is actually there

There comes a point when more Googling stops helping.

A website can tell you how an organisation describes its work. A job advert can tell you what it wants from one particular hire. Someone actually doing the work can tell you what their week looks like, which skills matter more than expected, what people coming from other industries tend to misunderstand, and how they found their own way in.

It helps to have a real question. “How do I get a meaningful job?” gives someone quite a lot to solve on your behalf. “I’ve been looking at organisations working on home energy and keep seeing partnership roles. I’ve spent the last eight years working with large retailers. How relevant is that kind of experience in your world?” gives you both somewhere to start.

One conversation won’t reveal your future. It might point towards another person, another organisation or a part of the problem you hadn’t thought about. It might make the original idea much less appealing. Either way, the picture is getting more real.

Try it with one problem

Pick one problem you’re curious enough to spend a couple of hours exploring. It doesn’t have to be the thing you promise to devote the rest of your career to. It just needs to be interesting enough to follow for a while.

Then:

1. Find three or four organisations doing noticeably different things about it. Look at what they actually do, rather than stopping at the mission statement.
2. Notice the people and jobs around that work. Which ones did you expect to find? Which ones didn’t you?
3. Follow one thread that interests you. It might be a particular approach, organisation or kind of job.
4. Find one person close enough to the work to answer a question you can’t get from Google.

You might end up exactly where you started. More likely, the original idea will get a bit more specific. “I want to do something about climate change” becomes “I keep coming back to how we get existing clean technologies into more homes”. “I’m interested in health” becomes “the logistics of getting treatments to people is much more interesting than I expected.”

That’s a much better thing to take into a career search.

This is where Escape to Impact starts

This way of exploring work that matters sits at the heart of Escape to Impact, Escape’s new nine-week accelerator for experienced professionals who want to use their careers to help tackle some of the world’s most important problems.

Nobody needs to arrive already fluent in the world of “impact careers”, or knowing exactly which problem or job is right for them. Some participants will already have a field in mind and want to understand how to make a credible move into it. Others will have several things they care about and need the chance to explore what working on them could actually look like.

The programme will help people understand some of the different ways important problems are being tackled, explore where their experience could be useful, and then get closer to the people and work itself. There will be practitioners, hiring managers and advisers to learn from, alongside real conversations, experiments and opportunities that help possible directions become much less theoretical.

The aim isn’t to emerge with a beautifully neat answer about your one perfect career. It’s to have a much clearer idea of where you could contribute, what you want to pursue, who you know inside that world and what you’re going to do next.

There are far more ways to work on an important problem than the obvious ones. Sometimes the best place to start is simply picking one and seeing where the work leads.

Applications for Escape to Impact are now open. [Find out more →]