Leveraging AI for Exploration, Career Readiness, and Connections
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers powerful new ways to support your professional journey. When used strategically, AI tools can be excellent brainstorming partners to help you generate ideas, gather information, and streamline your career development process.
A Note on Using AI: While these tools are incredibly valuable, it is important to remember that AI is not perfect and the technology is rapidly evolving. Your judgment and personal voice are still your greatest assets. The guidance on this page is designed to help you use AI effectively and ethically, but keep in mind that our recommendations may update over time as these tools continue to change.
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes an increasingly common tool in career development, it is crucial to understand how to use it both effectively and safely. The following best practices will help you maximize AI’s capabilities to boost your career readiness while protecting your privacy and maintaining your unique, authentic voice.
Understand the strengths of AI but also its limitations
The quick processing power of AI can be great for things like industry research, self assessment of career values, practical career advice, and the optimization of career documents. AI is not without its limitations however, so always check any information provided using your own judgment, understanding of the topic, and by consulting experts on the given subject matter.
Personalize Information
While AI is capable of producing vast amounts of information in a reasonably short time, the language it uses comes across very generic and at times robotic. Rather than copying and pasting information, reword information to fit your own voice, context and writing style. Employers and professionals are increasingly utilizing ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) to detect application materials with AI generated content.
Privacy Matters
Inputting sensitive information (full name, address, phone number, social security number, immigration status, etc.) into AI tools is never a recommended practice. Before uploading any company specific information, always be sure to check if you are working under an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement).
Be Specific with Prompts
Studies have shown that providing AI with specific context and information leads to much more detailed and accurate information. Adding detailed instructions, examples and sources can lead to more useful and personalized results.
Not Satisfied with the Results? Regenerate.
One of the benefits of using generative AI is the fact that you can opt to regenerate a response if it does not fit your specific needs or context. Keep in mind that some AI models put a limit on the amount of responses per day, so be strategic with how you prompt it.
LLM = Large Language Model
The most common AI model, LLM’s are trained on massive text data sets to understand, generate, and process human language for tasks like answering questions, summarizing, translating, and creating content.
GenAI = Generative AI
AI that creates new content (text, images, audio, video).
Prompt
The input or instruction given to an AI system.
Hallucination
When AI confidently produces incorrect or made-up information.
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