How to use AI as a career coach

- When you're on the hunt for a new job, it's not just about finding a new source of income, it's also about seeking opportunities that will advance your career and propel you up another rung in that career ladder. But let's face it, some people seem to have a knack for climbing that ladder faster than others and that is where this prompt comes in. Consider this your very own career coach, dedicated to helping you accelerate your professional journey. Now, this isn't a one and done prompt. It's designed to spark a conversation, to make you do some in internal searching and to encourage you to make some important decisions about the direction that you're heading in, but let me show you how it works. So we are in ChatGPT here. We are going to be using GPT-3.5, which is what you get on the free plan, but if you have the paid plan, you can use GPT-4 and that will give you a slightly better result. But 3.5 is going to be absolutely fine for us here. I'll paste in the prompt, read it out to you and explain a little bit about what it's doing. Now, these prompts are just written in plain English, so you'll be able to understand most of what this is about. You are an experienced career coach who knows how to help people accelerate their career journey and achieve their goals. What we're doing here is we're telling ChatGPT what role we want it to play, what character we wanted it to step into, then we're going to give out request. I want you to ask me questions to understand my ambitions, frustrations, level of seniority, current situation, skill level, the part of my job I love and hate, and other factors. So we're basically going to have a conversation. We are telling ChatGPT, that it needs to have a conversation with us to get all of the information that it needs to work with. Once you have all the information you need, I want you to give me practical advice about actions I should take right now, to help me hit my targets sooner. Ask the questions one by one, and wait for my response before giving me the next question. Okay, so we're telling it how to deal with the questions, not just to give us a barrage of questions, but to make it a conversation. Give us the questions one by one. When you have enough information, present your response using markdown, that just means that it's going to be formatted nicely with like bold titles and bullet points and things like that. Giving me a summary of what I've said, followed by practical advice for the actions I should take. If this is clear, ask me to describe my latest role. Okay, so there we go, please describe it to me. Let's start by discussing your latest role. Please describe it to me, including your job title, responsibilities and any significant achievements or projects you've been involved in. Okay, so we shall put in here some information that I've already written about this imaginary character. The imaginary character we have is a junior account manager at a design agency, so here we go. Thanks for sharing the details. Okay, so now it's giving us a barrage of questions. Let's deal with these. What are your long-term career goals? I can tell you about those. So I shall paste in some information about those. Okay, I now hit Shift+ Return. Because if I hit return, it will just enter that information to ChatGPT. I just want a new line here just to make it neat for me to see it, it doesn't matter to ChatGPT, this is about me. So if I hit Shift + Return or Shift + Enter, it will go onto the next line without just inputting the information. Are there any specific frustrations or challenges you currently face? So yes, I'm going to write here that I don't enjoy petty politics, there we go. What level of seniority are you aiming for in your career? I want to be-- I've kind of already written about that in the first section there. Could you please share your skill level and areas of expertise within your current role? I've already done that. What aspects of your job do you enjoy the most and what parts do you dislike? So I shall put in, I love presenting brilliant work and let's see if this is enough. I shall also put in some information here about my skills. All right, so I'm just putting in a whole bunch of information that I've pre-written here that's just about my skill level, my ambitions, what I like and what I don't like about the job. Great, so it got enough information from all of that to be able to give me a response. So it starts here by giving me, as you can see here, summary of the key points that I made during that discussion. So I can go back and I can check that just to make sure it's working with the right information, that it's not made anything up. Now, we've got some advice. Seek mentorship and professional development opportunities, that's some great advice for our imaginary account handler here. Network within the industry, again, absolutely right, choose the right work environment. A lot of people make the mistake of just choosing the first place that's willing to pay them money, rather than the place that will actually help them, give them the support and help them develop and learn on their career path. So that's a really important one there. Take on additional responsibilities and challenges, definitely, hone your business skills, build a strong portfolio, stay updated in industry trends. This is all good advice there. And if our imaginary account handler did this in their imaginary career, then I'm sure that they're going to have some incredible imaginary success. So go for it imaginary account handler. (air whooshing) As you can see, there's some pretty good advice in there and if you were to act in even a few pieces of that advice you'd definitely improve your chances of accelerating your career. I have to be honest, I kind of wish I had this level of guidance throughout my own career. Imagine if ChatGPT was available back in the nineties, my life would've taken a very different path. (discordant piano music) (upbeat tropical music)