High Impact Professionals
Career Ecosystem Support
High Impact Professionals empower professionals to pursue high-impact careers that address the world’s most pressing problems by providing career ecosystem support.
What problem is High Impact Professionals working on?
Many experienced professionals want to make a meaningful contribution to solving global problems but lack support in understanding how their skills, resources, and networks can be directed toward major cause areas such as Global Health & Wellbeing, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risk Reduction. While these professionals have substantial potential to accelerate progress through impactful career moves, founding new organizations, influencing their companies, or directing their philanthropic resources, the existing guidance and community infrastructure largely focuses on students or early-career individuals.
At the same time, many high-impact organizations struggle to access the experienced talent and leadership capacity they need to grow, navigate complex challenges, and scale promising interventions. Surveys suggest that mid- and senior-level professionals can be particularly valuable additions to these organizations, yet hiring pipelines and outreach efforts often fail to reach this group. This disconnect leaves critical skills, networks, and resources underutilized and limits the pace at which high-impact work can advance.
What does High Impact Professionals do?
High Impact Professionals (HIP) empowers experienced professionals to pursue high-impact career paths and apply their skills, resources, and networks toward the world’s most pressing problems. HIP provides structured career development support through cohort-based programs, curated resources, and targeted guidance that help professionals identify promising opportunities, address key uncertainties, and take concrete steps toward impactful work across areas like Global Health & Wellbeing, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risk Reduction.
As of 2025, HIP reports having supported 88 career transitions across these cause areas and inspired 91 effective giving pledges, reflecting a growing community of professionals committing their long-term resources to global good.
Alumni of the Impact Accelerator Program have:
- moved into mid- and senior-level roles at organizations such as GiveWell, GiveDirectly, Shrimp Welfare Project, MATS, and FAR.AI
- founded new nonprofits, including through Ambitious Impact’s Charity Entrepreneurship program
- taken on board positions at organisations such as Happier Lives Institute, Condor Research, Thrive Philanthropy, Overcome and ProVeg Belgium.
By enabling experienced professionals to redirect their skills, money, and networks toward high-impact opportunities, HIP strengthens the talent and leadership capacity available to organizations working on the world’s most pressing problems.
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.