Life is better when you love what you do. But we're expected to answer these big questions fresh out of school, with no life experience.
What should I do with my life? Who do I want to be? What am I good at? What do I love? These are profound questions that are a constant throughout life, not just in youth.
With work accounting for 8 hours a day, five days a week for 40-plus years, it's important to keep exploring these questions. Mentors are expensive, life is busy, and you change over the years, but artificial intelligence tools can be handy thought partners.
To test-run AI's career coach capabilities, I searched for a tool designed specifically as a career assistant. I found Career CoPilot, which promises to be the "GPS for your career," with career exploration, skills mapping, training and program recommendations, and job search assistance. I was bummed to see it's still in beta phase.
I saw it also uses OpenAI models, so ChatGPT was the second choice. ChatGPT needs no introduction. It was released in 2022, and the free version just got a lot better with the recent mass update to GPT-4o. The premium version is $20 a month.
Can ChatGPT work as a career coach?
AI is only as good as what you put into it, so start by prepping your prompt. Assign it a role and ask what it needs to provide personal advice.
I told it to "be my career counselor," and it provided a list of information to compile: current career status, education and skills, career goals, industry preferences, location flexibility, and lifestyle priorities:
Here's my response.
Freelance writer and journalist. I work with publications, brands and agencies. Fifteen years in the industry, 10 years as a full-time freelancer. Bachelor of public relations, graduate diploma in journalism Short-term goals: Continue to work as a freelance writer and journalist but grow in my strategy skills on the brand side. I want to land a business reporting contract to add to my tech and finance reporting niche.Long-term goals: Keep freelancing full-time but take three months off when I have a child. Get regular commissions in big-name publications. Have a long-term career as a writer, much like Joan Didion. I'm open to all suggestions. I'd prefer to stay in New York and have a geographical focus in NYC and Australia (given I'm Australian). Both lifestyle and financial freedom are important to me.
One observation to note: ChatGPT pulled data from a previous chat (where I referred to being a journalist in New York City), and it repeated it even when I deleted that conversation.
Career expansion suggestions
ChatGPT advised me to leverage existing contacts and experience to do things like "expand into business reporting," create passive income and "grow strategy skills on the brand side," with suggestions on how to do those things.
Here's some of the detail it suggested:
A lot of what ChatGPT suggested are things that I already do, so I gave it more context by saying I want to balance my current reporting contracts with ambitious occasional commissions in big-name publications like The New York Times, as well as maintaining corporate work. I specifically asked it to give me "some unique opportunities and paths I haven't thought of."
ChatGPT advised me that my blend of journalism, cultural writing and corporate work could lead to hybrid roles in multiple industries. Corporate thought leadership with tech founders, ghostwriting op-eds for execs, connecting cultural insights to my main beats, assisting in multi-country campaigns, working on public-interest campaigns for the government, scripting documentaries or narrative podcasts, and hosting workshops teaching businesses how to communicate with their customers.
Not bad! I fed the ideas I liked back into ChatGPT and asked for action plans and goals for each one. It was a bit too ambitious with what I could achieve in a year, so I asked it to zoom out the steps to one to three years and organize them in order of priority, from easy to hard.
You can read the "roadmap" ChatGPT created and organized, ordered based on complexity, networking requirements and skill-set extension, in full at the bottom of this article.
Once it creates this roadmap tailored for you, you can drill down into one project at a time and ask ChatGPT for a concise checklist and action plan with a specific goal and time range.
The best part about an AI tool like ChatGPT is the back-and-forth and the iterative process.
Circling back to ChatGPT as a career assistant
My best advice for using AI for career advice? Ask it for ideas, not answers.
It has its place, with some awesome nuggets of advice that can point you in the right direction, but it's not as good as chatting with a career expert or a BFF who knows you better than you know yourself.
We all need that person who can say, you'd rock (or suck) at that!
For more ways to use AI for job hunting, check out CNET's tips guides on how to create a resume using ChatGPT, how to find the job of your dreams using ChatGPT, how to use ChatGPT to write individualized, personalized cover letters and how to use AI to negotiate your starting salary.