I Don't Know What I Want to Do

How the job world is organised

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Some things everyone assumes you know, and nobody actually tells you:

• Companies are divided into teams with different functions. Some build the product, some sell it, some keep the organisation running, some set direction. When people ask what you do, they usually mean which of these teams you sit on, and how senior you are.
• Jobs are advertised under standard titles. No listing says “philosopher wanted”. They say analyst, associate, researcher, coordinator, consultant. A large part of job hunting is learning which titles describe work you would enjoy. Each guide on this site lists the relevant ones.
• Your first job is not a life decision. People change roles and industries all the time. Two years in a role that turns out to be wrong still leaves you with skills, references and a much clearer idea of what you want.
• A philosophy degree does not correspond to a job title. It corresponds to abilities: analysis, writing, following an argument to its end, changing your mind when the evidence says to. The guides here are different places where those abilities are paid for.

Questions worth asking yourself

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Not a test, and there are no scores. These are prompts to sit with, and each points at several guides at once, because the fields overlap and so do people. Most of us would answer differently at 22, 26 and 30.

What do you do when nobody assigns you anything? Free evenings are data. If you end up writing, look at Media & Writing. If you end up in arguments about what’s right, look at Ethics Consulting and AI & Data Ethics. If you organise things and people, look at Business, Mentoring & Beyond and Entrepreneurship & Startups.

When you read about a scandal or a disaster, which part holds your attention? The wrongness of it points at the ethics fields. The system that failed points at Risk and Blockchain & Fintech. The money points at Venture Capital and fintech. The people involved point at recruitment and mentoring. Most good stories have all four, which is rather the point: you can enter the same world through different doors.

Do you want philosophy to be the subject of your work, or the way you work? Ethics consulting and AI ethics make it the subject. Management Consulting, VC, startups and operations roles use it as a method. Neither is the more serious choice, and people cross between them mid-career in both directions.

How much structure do you want right now? Right now, not forever. Graduate schemes and big organisations give you training, a ladder and colleagues who have time for you. Small teams give you responsibility years early. Both are good first chapters, and each one teaches you what you’re missing from the other.

Whose job makes you a little jealous? Envy is useful information. When someone mentions their work and it stings slightly, write down what they do. After a few weeks the list will tell you something no questionnaire can.

If the answers point in three directions at once, that’s normal, and it isn’t a problem you need to resolve before starting. Read a couple of guides and then do something from the list below.

The fields, in plain language

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AI & Data Ethics

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Tech companies, auditors and research institutes hire people to work out what counts as fair or harmful in AI systems, and to build rules around that. Roles are advertised as AI ethics researcher, responsible AI analyst or AI governance manager.

Ethics Consulting

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Small firms and university centres that organisations pay for ethical advice. Roles: ethics consultant, research governance adviser. Of all the fields here, this one is closest to what you did in the seminar room, with real cases instead of thought experiments.

Management Consulting

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Firms like the Big Four and McKinsey hire graduates to solve business problems in small teams. Roles: business analyst, associate consultant. There is a marked entrance (graduate schemes, case interviews) and the training carries into whatever you do afterwards.

Risk & Catastrophic Risk

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Teams at tech companies that prevent harm on their platforms, and research institutes that study large-scale threats. Roles: risk analyst, trust & safety analyst, researcher.

Blockchain & Fintech

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Young companies building financial and governance systems from scratch. Roles: protocol researcher, governance analyst, community lead. Credentials matter less here than clear thinking.

Venture Capital

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Small funds that invest in early companies. Roles: venture analyst, investment associate. The core of the job is written argument: an investment memo defends a debatable claim against objections.

Entrepreneurship & Startups

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Starting a company, or joining one early and doing a bit of everything. Roles: founder, founding team, chief of staff, generalist. More ownership and faster learning than any graduate scheme, less stability.

Media & Writing

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Content marketing, technical writing, journalism, public philosophy. Roles: content writer, copywriter, editor. The obvious direction if writing was your favourite part of the degree.

Cybersecurity & Recruitment

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Finding and judging technical experts without being one yourself. Roles: recruitment consultant, talent acquisition specialist.

Business, Mentoring & Beyond

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The ordinary roles most organisations run on: operations, programme management, people, ESG. Also mission-driven work like mentoring organisations. Roles: operations associate, programme coordinator, chief of staff.

Mostly: start doing things

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Reading about fields has diminishing returns, and it arrives fast. Two weeks of trying something teaches you more than two months of research, because you learn how the work feels rather than how it’s described. None of these commit you to anything, and all of them generate information:

• Write one piece and publish it anywhere. A blog post about a question you care about. This is the direct route into writing careers, and every other field on this site treats published writing as evidence of thinking.
• Ask one person about their job. Find someone whose work looks interesting, on LinkedIn or through our stories, and ask for twenty minutes. People say yes to this far more often than students expect.
• Take one free course. ForHumanity’s algorithm ethics course, the DeFi and digital currency MOOCs in our blockchain resources, or a practice case from a consulting firm’s careers site. See which one you finish.
• Join something. A community, a volunteer organisation, a project that needs hands. Joshua’s route into cybersecurity ran through volunteering at ForHumanity, not through a job application.
• Start something small. A reading group, a newsletter, an event. Let’s Phi itself started this way. You find out quickly whether building things suits you.

Do a few of these in parallel. The ones you keep doing without effort are telling you where to look next.

This list is not complete

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These are the fields people in our community have gone into. We also know philosophers in law, public policy, government, teaching, product management and publishing, and there are paths nobody here has taken yet. If you’ve built a career we haven’t covered, tell us about it. Someone a few years behind you needs to read it.