AI and career change - how to generate ideas and find contacts
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Can getting up close and personal with AI help you change careers? Absolutely. Use your preferred AI tool cleverly and cautiously (more on the ‘cautious’ bit later), and you’ll save swathes of time researching, organising and analysing useful data.
Used wisely, it can also help you create killer job applications and even refine your interview technique. Read more on using AI in career change to refine your CV, rehearse your interview here.
But while it’s fab for researching, reviewing and sorting through oodles of information, AI will never impress whoever needs to hear it by telling your story in your voice. Nor will it ever come close to replicating the insights, intel, and connections you’ll gather by getting off Google and going out into the real world.
Ultimately, AI’s just a tool, albeit a seductively powerful one. And like any other tool that you rely on to make a job simpler, faster and more efficient, your results depend on how skilfully you use it.
Underpinning everything you’ll read on the Internet about how to feed AI to get it to give you the goods, is this often quoted, unattributed truth: Garbage in, (polished, confident) garbage out. More on this in a minute.
Straddle the delicate balancing act between picking AI’s enormous robot brain to augment what only you can do with your brilliant human one — and, yep, AI can help you generate career change ideas, find people to talk to, and prepare for structured career conversations.
1. Generating career change ideas – Get clues about roles and fields where you might fit
Tell your AI tool of choice your strengths, skills, values and interests and ask it to give you 5-10 specific job titles.
Be curious and open about what AI gives you but maintain a healthy scepticism. Research shows that a significant amount of the information that those astoundingly clever bots churn out is incorrect. AI also has a habit of telling you about really niche roles or things it’s made up!
If you’re tempted to dive down an AI-assisted research rabbit hole for each of its suggested roles, remember you don’t YET know if the bot’s intell is true, current, or relevant to you! So before you invest oodles of research time and energy, test those ideas in the real world by having some structured career conversations.
People doing those roles can flesh out the reality around what AI has told you. Most humans are hardwired to want to help and are happy to talk to you about the day-to-day nitty-gritty, the current state of the market, whether or not the role is niche, etc.
Career conversations can also be springboards. Ask your helpful humans if they have colleagues you might speak to. Tell them about your skills and interests and ask if they can suggest other places and positions you might investigate, and people they know doing them. AI can’t do that!
Now to find those humans.
2. Mapping your LinkedIn network
Among your actual and digital networks, LinkedIn looms large as a place to build connections and find opportunities. Recruiter Michael Brown asked AI to analyse his LinkedIn network. He aimed to uncover, ’Who’s in my orbit, where the strongest clusters are, and which warm intros I’ve been sitting on without realising it.’
Read Michael Brown’s post. Download a copy of his AI prompt — LinkedIn Deep Network Analysis.
3. Making email contact
If people you’re keen to talk to, either in or outside your established network, aren’t active or even on LinkedIn, find their company name and ask AI, ‘What is the common email format for x company?’
Then send them a brief but perfectly pitched email that makes it easy for them to make time for you:
Be crystal clear about being a curious career changer who is not asking for a job
Set a time limit and suggest a venue - thirty minutes over coffee or on Zoom
Offer a range of times and dates, and ask what else might work for them
Go ahead! You’ve got nothing to lose.
4. Preparing questions for career conversations
Great, now you have a real human to speak to!
Paste in their LinkedIn profile or job title.
If you’re already using AI to support your career change, it should be all over your strengths, skills, values and interests. If not, remind it and highlight the most relevant ones for the conversation you're about to have with this person.
Then:
Paste in the LinkedIn profile or provide the job title of your human
Ask AI to generate 10 questions you could ask them to understand more about their role and whether it would be suitable for you.
NOTE: Follow up on a sparky career conversation by asking AI, ‘I liked [type of tasks, aspects of culture, working environment etc,] from my conversation with [person’s name, title, company], where could I look next?’
5. Gathering industry intel … with a massive grain of salt
If you put AI’s formidable intel-gathering powers to work:
Researching industry-wide shifts and trends, and highlighting in-demand skills
Summarising industry-specific career prospects, stance on work-life balance or salary expectations
Profiling interesting companies – their culture, competitors, market share, etc.
Image from https://neilpatel.com/blog/ai-hallucination-data-study/
Fine. But, and it’s a big but, know that this volatile data evolves at warp speed. So, it’s easy to fall prey to AI’s penchant for getting some things seriously wrong. Chances are, you’ll get incomplete or out-of-date information.
If you’re dead set on disappearing down these ‘shifts and trends’ rabbit holes, go for it. But when you emerge blinking into the light, reality check your AI results by doing your own independent research and talking to humans involved in the fields you’re keen to explore.
How to prompt with purpose and authority
If you’re keen to refine your prompting technique to reduce the risk of generating garbage responses.
Here’s a succinct, readable overview of what to ask AI and how to organise it. Its 10 tips are illustrated with good and bad prompt examples.
Prompt engineering best practices: Top 10 tips
Tip number 9 (Ask for Evidence) is my favourite. Because, as this author says, ‘AI can sometimes hallucinate, making claims that are false or unsupported.’ Who’d a thought it?!
Career change is a real-world, research-driven adventure. But for the preparatory phase before you head out to test your ideas with the help of flesh and blood humans, AI is an absolute boon. Make the most of its capabilities by:
Prompting it with precision and authority, including telling AI what you don’t want it to give you
Checking the veracity, currency and completeness of what AI gives you, cos... you know … hallucinations.
Need a 100% human nudge to get cracking on your career change? Book a chat.
Hi, I’m Jo Green, a Career Change Coach.
I help thoughtful professionals who feel stuck or unfulfilled in their work find a clearer direction and move into work that feels meaningful and aligned with who they are.
Since 2016 I’ve supported hundreds of people to reshape their careers – whether that means changing roles, starting something new, or finding work that contributes more positively to people or the planet.
If you're thinking about a career change and want structured support, you can learn more about my career change coaching here.
Or you’re welcome to book a free 20-minute consultation to talk about where you’re at and whether coaching could help.
