The cornerstone of financial stability and achieving your financial goals for many people is making more money and for most, the shortest clearest path is by improving your career prospects. Learn how ChatGPT can help you plan a career path and gain the skills necessary to land your next job.
We’ll show you how we use ChatGPT for career planning, and identify ways to make more money.
Let’s jump in!
Table of Contents
How to Use ChatGPT to Find a Better Job
For many people, making more money in their career is the fastest clearest way to being able to provide a better life for themselves and their families. There are a number of tools on the market that attempt to help people identify better career prospects, but none of them can provide personally tailored advice like ChatGPT can.
There are also sites that recommend specific prompts, and we would recommend people look past an individual prompt and actually take advantage of the conversational nature of ChatGPT.
Think of ChatGPT as your own personal career counselor to help you identify design a long-term plan and build shorter term goals that help you achieve it.
Career Pathing with ChatGPT
To get the most out of ChatGPT career pathing, you will have to take a step back and be very honest with yourself. What are your current skillsets, what areas interest you, and how long it will reasonably take to improve your existing skillset and gain experience to achieve the next step in your career.
Step 1.) Start broad and work your way down to a more concise career path. Here’s an example of a conversation starter used wiht ChatGPT.
Example Prompt: list 20 paths to go from a minimum wage job with minimal skillsets to $72,000 annual salary.
Response: Certainly! Moving from a minimum wage job to a $72,000 annual salary would typically involve skills development, experience accumulation, and sometimes a bit of strategic risk-taking. Here are 20 paths that could help you achieve that:
Certainly, here is a list of career paths that someone starting from a minimum wage position with minimal skillsets could potentially follow to reach an annual salary of $72,000, which is often considered the approximate median household income in the United States:
- Retail Management: Starting in an entry-level retail position and working up to a management position can provide a significant salary increase.
- Sales Professional: Beginning in entry-level sales and advancing to a high-level sales position, potentially with commission, can yield a substantial income.
- Trade Skills: Training as an electrician, plumber, or in HVAC can lead to high-paying jobs after apprenticeship completion.
- Information Technology: Starting with basic tech support and acquiring certifications can lead to well-paying IT roles.
Note: This example has been truncated,but try asking ChatGPT for 10x more suggestions than you otherwise would have. By glancing through these ideas you may find additional ideas that are useful.
Step 2.) Ask lots of follow-up questions. Here are some examples of what you could use to get more background information on a potential career path.
Example Prompt: What is a path to go from a minimal skillset to a career in HVAC?
Example Prompt: How much does school typically cost?
Example Prompt :How much does school typically cost?
Example Prompt: Are there ways to enter this field with no money?
You have to be somewhat creative and follow your curiosity when talking with ChatGPT. Take the advice like high level background and try having a conversation like you would with a career counselor that has a very broad set of knowledge.
Note: ChatGPT doesn’t have to only be used for introductory jobs. You could explain your current situation such as a computer programmer with skills in python, C#, working with API connections currently making $80,000 a year and would like a career path to make $120,000 a year to gain insights on potential career paths.
How to Use ChatGPT for Skill Road Mapping
Once you’ve determined a career path that you’d like to pursue or learn more about, ChatGPT can provide you with additional information about which skills are important. This step also gives you a bit of insight into what a training path might look like.
Prompt: Briefly outline the skills needed to go from zero to a Microsoft Power BI Developer
Response: Starting a career as a Microsoft Power BI Developer from zero involves acquiring a mix of technical and analytical skills, as well as an understanding of business intelligence principles. Here’s a brief outline of the skills you would need to develop:
- Fundamental IT Skills:
- Basic understanding of computer systems, databases, and software operations.
- Data Handling Skills:
- Knowledge of how to collect, store, and retrieve data from various sources.
- Understanding data warehousing concepts and ETL processes (Extract, Transform, Load).
- Database Knowledge:
- Proficiency in SQL for querying databases.
The previous list has been truncated, but you can continue asking questions such as what is SQL, where can I learn these skills, what resources are available, how much do they cost, etc.
The main point is that regardless of what your skillset currently is and where you want to go, ChatGPT can help you bridge the gap and make a plan.
Tip: Try telling ChatGPT your existing skillsets and things that you are already good at and have it provide a list of skills that will help improve your odds of gaining a better career.
Using ChatGPT for Training and Improving Skills
First, we don’t recommend relying on ChatGPT too heavily for completing tasks completely on your behalf in the workplace. You should still put time and effort into learning specific skillsets because it will become painfully obvious to a manager if you have to reference AI every time you’re asked to complete a task.
Depending on the career path, especially things that are digital in nature such as marketing analytics, or computer programming there are countless online courses and YouTube videos. YouTube can also be a great resource for technical jobs that require you to have a working knowledge of construction or techniques you would learn in a trade school.
While working through a structured course, online course, or a personalized learning path, ChatGPT can be a great reference point and can help explain difficult concepts in different ways.
Note: Try asking ChatGPT to explain a concept like they would to an 8th grader or different level and it will adjust the explanation and analogies accordingly.
Be aware that ChatGPT is not 100% accurate. The more niche the information is, typically the less training data it has to provide a correct answer. Because of this, we do not recommend using ChatGPT as your sole learning resource.
Interview Prep and Resume Assistance
Should you use ChatGPT to generate a resume for you? No. Even though ChatGPT is fairly new this move is already played out and recruiters can spot them a mile away. What you can do is use ChatGPT to help you craft a resume by having a conversation with the AI, copy and paste potential bullet points into the system and let it recommend different wording.
Where it becomes even more useful is for interview prep.
For example, ask ChatGPT to provide common questions and responses for generic behavioral interview questions and ask it to provide common interview questions and answers specific to the job you are interviewing for.
You could even give it industry information or copy and paste an entire job listing it for a more tailored response.
While preparing for an interview, don’t try and memorize responses it will come off as super awkward. Use it as a tool to prep yourself to present your own story, skillsets, abilities and ambitions.
Generating Side Hustle Ideas with ChatGPT
If you’re already gainfully employed and working on building experience in your current field but want to make some side money, there are two resources we recommend. #1 by far is the Side Hustle Community Board on Reddit the second is ChatGPT.
Used in conjunction with each other you can get ideas from either source and then use ChatGPT to better understand the skills or potential local laws and licensing requirements to further research.
Limitations of ChatGPT
We want to make sure that people are aware that ChatGPT is an AI Chat Bot. It can provide background information, help you brainstorm, help you plan, help you learn, and help you plan your next move. It can’t put in the work, time and effort required to improve your career prospects.
As a large language model it can be best used as a reference point augmented with other information sources. There is a nearly limitless amount of information available on YouTube, and the internet is full of low cost structured training courses that can help you get started improving the skills you need to upgrade your career.
We’re not saying this to discourage you, but we want to make sure that you have a realistic expectation of what ChatGPT can do and can’t do. ChatGPT.
Career Growth is a Game of Inches
Our final point is that gaining experience and building skillsets take time. If you want to go from $25,000 USD per year to $125,000 USD per year, it’s going to take a considerable amount of time. There are steps involved, experience to be gained, and the more money you make the longer it typically takes to find your next job and next step up in a career path.
It’s also important to think about career changes and pay in percentage terms. Here’s an example of what we mean.
Scenario 1: Debbie makes $10 an hour. Debbie takes a job making $12 an hour. The $2 increase is relational to a 20% increase. in compensation.
Scenario 2: Debbie makes $50 an hour. Debbie takes a job making $52 an hour. The $2 increase is relational to a 4% increase in compensation.
The point being when you’re not making a lot of money, small increases in pay can have an outsized impact on your lifestyle. As you make more money, the increases have to be even larger for you to notice it. That’s why it’s important to take it one step at a time.
It’s much easier to gain a few extra dollar an hour at the lower end of pay scales than it is to immediate jump from $10 an hour to $50. Taking the incremental steps, increasing skills, increasing experience and a series of small compounding pay increases over an extended period can add up to a big difference.
Conclusion
Regardless of where you currently are in your career, tools like ChatGPT can help you identify potential career paths, build a training plan, help you learn additional skills, write a resume, and prep for an interview. The AI tool won’t put it in the work and the effort for you, but it can make things much easier and tailored to your own specific career journey.
Making more money and moving up in a career takes experience which can only be gained with time, focus on small compounding wins that can add up to life changing differences in income.