Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Your Career Journey
As a Dartmouth student preparing for your career, internship, or job search, generative artificial intelligence (AI) offers powerful tools to enhance the process. From career brainstorming to analyzing job descriptions, AI can help you at various stages of your career development. However, it’s essential to recognize both the strengths and limitations of AI to maximize its benefits while avoiding common pitfalls.
Generative AI is a tool. As such, it is more appropriate for some uses than others. It certainly isn’t a replacement for your creativity and critical thinking. While offering value, it is not foolproof and can sometimes produce misleading or inaccurate information. Always approach AI-generated content with a discerning eye, and consider meeting with a CPD Career Coach to ensure that your materials and strategies are as effective as possible.
Please feel encouraged to meet with a CPD Career Coach for guidance on how to effectively use AI in your Career Development and to help you evaluate your results!
Check out our Prompt Library
Recommended Uses
- Career Exploration, Brainstorming, and Ideation
AI excels at pattern recognition, making it valuable for exploring potential career paths. By analyzing your skills, interests, and values, AI can generate tailored suggestions for industries, job titles, and roles that align with your unique profile. This capability is particularly useful in the brainstorming phase, helping you identify career opportunities you may not have considered. (click here for more…) - Leveraging AI for Industry, Role, and Company Insights
AI can enhance industry and job role research. It can offer insights into various career paths, including an overview of the field, common tasks and duties, and typical entry-level positions. This can be helpful when visualizing career ideas and exploring a possible fit. Additionally, AI can highlight companies or organizations within industries, helping you more effectively target your networking and internship/job search. (click here for more…) - Analysis and Optimization for Documents and AI-Screened Interview Prep
Leverage AI’s strengths in semantic analysis to identify keywords, skills, and experience in internship and job descriptions so that you can best optimize your application materials. In the increasingly automated environment of applicant tracking systems (ATS), it is even more important to prioritize keyword and skills alignment. Similar strategies can be used to optimize potential answers to AI-screened interviews. (click here for more…) - Drafting Content
While the CPD does not generally recommend using AI to write resumes or cover letters from scratch, it can be valuable for suggesting strategies to improve or optimize your existing content. For less critical tasks, such as drafting networking outreach emails or creating a LinkedIn profile summary, AI can significantly speed up the process. Use AI to generate drafts that you can then refine and personalize, ensuring the final product is both professional and reflective of your unique voice and personality. (click here for more…)
Best Practices for Using AI in Career Development
- Leverage AI Strengths: Harness AI’s ability to analyze patterns, generate varied responses, and process information quickly for career brainstorming, industry research, and document optimization. However, always validate the output with your own contextual understanding, personal experience, and emotional intelligence to ensure the results are both accurate and meaningful.
- Fact-Check and Personalize: Be aware that AI may produce generic or incorrect information, so critical review and editing are necessary. Always verify the accuracy of AI-generated content and personalize it to fit your reality, style, and voice. In the digital era of job applications, employers are increasingly equipped to detect AI-generated content, so relying solely on automated outputs may jeopardize your application. Always infuse AI-generated content with your unique voice and style.
- Privacy Considerations: Avoid inputting sensitive personal information (e.g., your full name, email address, cell number, etc.) into AI tools to protect your privacy. Avoid sharing and uploading confidential employer information, especially if you were working under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). This is something to be mindful of in general when describing your tasks and projects in resumes and cover letters. The best practice is to err on the side of caution and avoid using AI when dealing with sensitive or confidential information.
- Context Stuffing: Provide the AI with specific content, context, or information to improve the relevance and quality of the results. By “stuffing” the prompt with detailed instructions, examples, or sources (such as content from your resume or prior cover letters), you can guide the AI to produce more usable and personalized results.
- Experiment and Iterate: Don’t hesitate to re-prompt and refine AI-generated content multiple times to achieve the best results.
