Planning your career could be one of your most important life tasks. And new artificial intelligence (AI) tools might help you start the journey toward achieving your goals and dreams.
The number of AI career tools has exploded recently with advances in AI. Generative AI can help you discover and prepare for your ideal occupation. It can provide personalized advice, brainstorm with you, and suggest alternative career paths.
Jump to:
- Discover your ideal occupation
- Understand your values and preferences
- Know the job market
- Get personalized advice
- Identify skills and skill gaps
- Brainstorm and make decisions
- Explore alternative career paths
Discover your ideal occupation
Career planning begins with identifying your ideal occupation. However, it can be hard to find a career that excites you. And once you have identified your dream career, you still have to work out how to achieve it.
AI career discovery tools can give you personalized career recommendations by taking into account your interests, skills, values, personality, and preferences. These tools have questions and quizzes to determine the information they need. They can be powerful and accurate.
Career discovery tools include Find Your Fit on alis, Existential, and CareerExplorer. All are suitable for job seekers at any stage of their careers. Audo is another option that asks you to take a personality assessment and provide your work experience. Then you can request details on a certain career path, or Audo will provide suggestions.
Understand your values and preferences
You’ll begin to understand your values and preferences more as you use career discovery tools and the career assistants we’ll look at shortly. It can be hard to come up with these important characteristics off the top of your head. AI makes this task easier with quizzes and by asking conversational questions that can help draw out your answers.
Crystal Knows is a slightly different platform that analyzes your “digital footprint,” including social media, to identify your personality traits. The tool then suggests career paths that align with your personality type.
Know the job market
Analytics is one of AI's superpowers. Career tools use AI-driven analytics to provide insights into industry trends, job vacancy forecasts, and skill requirements. AI draws on millions of job posts, resumés, and other data to produce accurate information on hiring patterns, necessary skills, and salary expectations.
These AI tools can:
- Analyze labour market trends
- Find high-demand industries
- Interpret emerging trends
Job, industry, and salary analytics functions can be found in Existential, Career Copilot, and Payscale. Talentprise also reveals industry trends, and it can help you discover “hidden” jobs at local and global employers too.
Get personalized advice
Generative AI chatbots with natural language capabilities have been developed as career assistants and advisors. They are available 24/7 to answer career questions, keep you on track, or chat through a problem. Here are some examples of the chatbots that are available:
- Career Copilot offers immediate and expert answers, has live job postings, and can also help with writing resumés and cover letters and preparing for interviews. It’s available in multiple languages.
- College Tools is a platform built for career planning and development. It can also offer customized advice for career planning and job hunting and provide career analytics.
Career chatbots are becoming very popular because it’s just too expensive to hire a human career coach on a one-to-one basis, and human coaches can be hard to find.
Identify skills and skill gaps
LinkedIn Learning’s AI career coach is a chatbot that can chat about open job opportunities on LinkedIn. It can evaluate whether you are a good fit for a job posted on LinkedIn by looking at your profile. The bot will identify skills that are missing and required—this is your “skill gap” for the job.
The not-for-profit educational platform Khan Academy has also launched an AI tool called Khanmigo in partnership with ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI. Teachers can use Khanmigo to help young students master skills faster and get a head start in their careers.
Career planning can be critical to career success. It helps you take control of getting what you want out of life, achieve your vision, and stay focused. And now you can explore AI tools that can help with every element.
Brainstorm and make decisions
Again, career chatbots like Career Copilot allow you to bounce around ideas and brainstorm, which can aid your decision-making process. You can also use ChatGPT, Bard, or Microsoft’s Copilot. These bots can brainstorm conversationally. You can give them lots of information in a detailed prompt and ask for specific ideas. Or you can just ask a quick question and see if the response inspires you, like this:
“I’m planning my career. I like to be active, preferably outside. I enjoy nature and sports. Can you give me some ideas?”
ChatGPT and other tools can also answer questions about in-demand careers, high-paid jobs, and jobs that match your goals. If you use a prompt similar to the one above, you can follow up by asking which of the suggested jobs is most in demand or which has the highest pay. You can also start a new query. For example:
“Can you list 20 careers that combine time in the office and time outside?”
Then ask more questions to expand or refine the list. By simply “chatting” with ChatGPT, you can explore your own ideas, gain knowledge, and be better prepared to make decisions.
Explore alternative career paths
Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, career chatbots, and discovery applications can suggest a variety of career path options. You can either review lists of alternatives or explore these tools for specific recommendations.