4 Key Things Career Centers Should Tell Students about ChatGPT

To set your students and team up for immediate success, here are the four messages I recommend you share at the beginning of the year:

#1: We Want You to Use These Tools

To prevent any confusion about where you stand, it’s best to come right out and say it as soon as students matriculate:

  • Our #1 goal is to help you launch a fulfilling career
  • There is already powerful evidence that suggests AI tools can help you achieve better career outcomes
  • As such, we encourage you to learn about and leverage these tools to increase your odds of success

Taking such a clear stance from Day 1 not only helps with alignment, it also makes it clear to students that you’re aligned with them (since they’re likely using these tools already). Which will only enhance their qualitative perceptions of your department on those end-of-program surveys!

#2: We Want You to Use These Tools Right

However, as we all know from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility!

As such, it’s important that you pair the first message with a clear statement around accountability:

As powerful as these tools are, you are still responsible for any content they produce. Just because a resume bullet or cover letter paragraph was shaped by ChatGPT doesn’t absolve you of ownership over those documents. And because every application you submit is both a representation of you and our institution, we ask that you please sign our AI Honor Code before accessing our jobs database:

I promise to use AI tools in accordance with our institution’s best practices, including:

  • Carefully proof-reading all AI-generated content for both accuracy and honesty before incorporating into my application materials
  • Checking citations, wherever possible, given that AI models may rely upon outdated or biased information
  • Considering whether any information I share with these models is confidential, given that it may be incorporated into the models’ datasets

Now, I know it may feel like overkill to have your students sign an AI Honor Code - or to tie it back to job access - but my belief is that, by doing so, you’ll accomplish two important goals:

  1. You’ll have more peace of mind that your students won’t damage your reputation with your valuable employer partners
  2. You’ll have set the stage for even deeper conversations and training here, given that the stakes are now raised

#3: We Want You to Use These Tools With Us

Having sent clear signals about both the upside and downside of these new tools, you’re now ready to begin the AI journey with your students.

And so rather than turn them loose to figure out AI on their own, I recommend integrating it into your early engagement in two important ways:

  1. You Career Orientation
  2. Your First 1:1 Coaching Sessions

Career Orientation

Just like you have an orientation session dedicated to resumes, networking, and LinkedIn, it makes sense to kick off the year with an AI overview.

But rather than make it a dry recitation of AI facts (“This is how an LLM works…”), I suggest turning it into an interactive workshop like so:

  • Start with the broad frameworks I shared above:
    • Here are the best ways to use AI: GPT (Generic tool selection / Prompts with context + clear outputs / Talk with the models)
    • Here are the things to watch out for: ABC (Accuracy / Bias / Confidentiality)

  • Next, do a live AI demo of the three stages of the career development process:
    • Find potential career paths
    • Identify the most important keywords for your resume
    • Generate sample interview questions and engaging answers

  • Finally, have students break into pairs to practice generating effective prompts - and have them share out the most successful ones with the whole group - since this:
    • Starts building their muscle memory for when you’re not there to guide them
    • Helps them get to know their classmates

1:1 Coaching Sessions

Once you’ve provided these high-level guidelines, you should encourage your coaches to incorporate them into even their earliest meetings with students.

Depending on where your incoming students are in their job search journeys, you could have coaches do any of the following:

  • For a student who has no idea where to begin…
    • Have the coach do an AI prompt that incorporates their skills and interests in a search for potential career paths - and then evaluates those paths based on the most important career priorities for the student

  • For a student with a career hypothesis they’d like to test…
    • Have the coach do an AI prompt to generate a LinkedIn connection message for specific alums in this space - and then generate specific informational interview questions that target the student’s top priorities

  • For a student who’s ready to start applying to specific jobs…
    • Have the coach do an AI prompt that identifies the most important keywords based on their favorite job descriptions - and then scans their resume to identify which ones are missing

But no matter which stage a student is at, having effective AI usage modeled for them from the very beginning will go a long way to helping them carry that skill throughout their job search and into their careers!

#4: We Want You to Use These Tools Where They Make Sense

With a clear foundation in place, it’s now time to get the big boosts in efficiency that make AI so tantalizing.

And that means guiding students on where (and where not!) to use these tools.

Now, since AI is clearly so good at basic writing and pattern-matching, here are the kinds of tasks where I’d encourage its use:

  • Coming up with a list of potential career paths
  • Reviewing resumes, cover letters, and LinkedIn profiles for grammar and spelling
  • Identifying missed opportunities to include keywords and quantitative outcomes in these documents
  • Preparing a list of sample interview questions and answers

On the other hand, because it’s so poor at interpersonal tasks, here’s what I’d leave to your coaches:

  • Understanding the student’s true skills + passions and choosing a few paths to pursue
  • Reviewing resumes, cover letters, and LinkedIn profiles for style and storytelling
  • Doing a gut check on job applications for first impressions + feel
  • Practicing interview questions and giving specific, actionable feedback

 And it turns out that this is great news for both your students and coaches because:

  1. Students can get a lot of basic tasks done BEFORE they meet with their coach
  2. Which then frees the coach up to spend less time going over resume grammar and more time focusing on the big picture - i.e., helping your students set clear goals and then guiding them to achieve them, no matter how challenging the hiring process

Bonus Message: We Want You to Use Our Tools

Now, if you only follow the steps above, you’ll still easily be in the top decile of all career centers in the world in terms of AI leadership.

However, if you’re not content with just leading your students here but you actually want to lead the whole world, I’ve got one little bonus tip for you:

Consider creating your very own AI tool!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Jeremy, are you crazy? I had never even used a single AI tool when I started this guide and now you want me to make my own?

But here’s the really crazy thing: You absolutely can.

How do I know?

Because I did! And just to be clear, I’m not a programmer. But with a few simple off-the-shelf tools, you can build your very own AI. And in doing so, you can combine all the power of ChatGPT with all the expertise that you and your team have built up to create a truly unique model that’s custom-fit for your institution.

Here’s how:

  1. Start by checking out my LinkedIn Profile Bot. You’ll see how I built it on top of that familiar Google Sheets interface - and yet, the advice it gives is more specific and effective than any ChatGPT would give on its own, since it’s being driven by prompts that harness my insider LinkedIn expertise.
  2. Now look at a similar tool that I built for Hostos Community College in NYC. If you click into cell B6, you’ll see that the prompt is highly specific to Hostos, which leads to highly Hostos-specific responses.
  3. OK, time to start making your own bot! If you start with the HostosBot as a template, try editing some of the cells in Column B to reflect your institution’s values and traditions.
    1. For instance, if you believe that a student should choose a career path based on skills and experiences as well as interests, add that language into the prompt in cell B4.
    2. Or if your office has a preferred resume template and an existing document with advice and examples, you can paste that into cell B9 and update the prompt to ask ChatGPT to identify discrepancies between the student’s resume and your best practices.

  4. Once you’ve got a flow that makes sense for your institution, try it out with a couple of coaches and students. Because AI tools don’t always give the exact same response to the same prompt, you’ll want to test it with a few different use cases to make sure it still works the way you expect.
  5. And then, when you’re ready for primetime, you can publish your bot just by sharing a copy with your students. And voila - they now have access to an AI tool that’s truly the best of both worlds (ChatGPT + your team’s own expertise)!

While this is fully optional, I’ll just note that I’m happy to work pro bono with any universities interested in trying this technique out. That’s because, like Ethan Mollick at Wharton, I firmly believe that what AI needs most now isn’t more technology, but more human expertise. And I’d love to help you encode your expertise into the next generation of powerful career tools! ⚡️

PS: Feel free to share with your colleagues! And if you ever want me to lead an AI training for your students or colleagues this year, just say the word.

Why Career Centers Need to Lead on ChatGPT

Early on, many of my career center partners had hoped that their institutional leaderships would fill the decision-making vacuum created by ChatGPT and its Large Language Model (LLM) peers. Caught between professors bemoaning the end of essay assignments and students adopting it overnight, career centers really could have used some urgent clarity about the right way to approach these new tools.

But let’s be real.

Academia is great at many things - driving foundational R&D, protecting intellectual freedom, opening doors to opportunity - but speed has never been one of them. It wasn’t the case when I was a career coach at the University of Michigan and I’ve yet to hear from any of my 100+ partners that it’s so at their institution… 🙂

So rather than sit on the sidelines and wait for a white knight to arrive (only to turn out that you’re really waiting for Godot), career leaders have to lead.

And we all know there are two ways to lead: From the front or from the back.

Now, I understand why it might be tempting to take a reactive, wait-and-see approach here:

  • It buys you time to see how things play out
  • It doesn’t commit you to anything if this world changes (and it changes a lot!)
  • And it just feels safer if you’re still learning about this world yourself!

But as tempting as it might be to lead from the back, let me share four even more powerful reasons why you shouldn’t be afraid to lead from the front: 

  • For your students
  • For your institution
  • For your employer partners
  • For yourself

For Your Students

Two realities co-exist for your students today:

  1. They’re already using ChatGPT.
    89% of students surveyed just a month after the product’s launch admitted to using it for homework.
  2. They’re using it badly.
    The fact that so many students immediately glommed onto using ChatGPT for homework means the majority of students have already developed bad habits - i.e., using it just to get answers as fast as possible, missing out on all the powerful techniques described in the previous section.

So just like you wouldn’t let students build a resume without a template, instruction, and feedback, why would you let students wander in the wilderness when you now know that there’s a better way?

For Your Institution

Even if you were to leave your students to their own devices with AI, you’d still have consequences to face - namely because every time a student applies to one of your employer partners, they not only carry their personal brand but your institution’s as well.

And so imagine yourself in my shoes as a hiring manager. I’m starting to see job applications every week that we’re clearly written with the most rudimentary of ChatGPT prompts (“Write me a cover letter for a job at Khan Academy”). They’re generic, they’re boring, and frankly, they drain any interest I might have had in those candidates.

Now imagine that I start to notice a trend across these applications (or even use ChatGPT’s Advanced Data Analysis tool to identify the trend for me): Hey, hold on a second… they’re all coming from… wait for it… your institution.

How excited do you think I am to advocate for a continued partnership? Especially when candidates from peer schools are knocking my socks off with highly tailored, engaging applications - whether written with great prompts or not.

So for the sake of your institution, your reputation, and your partnerships, you’ve got to get ahead of this thing.

For Your Employer Partners

But wait, there’s more: It’s not just that employers hate bad AI applications.

It’s that they actually crave good AI skills.

Because again, think about what it feels like to be the boss at any of your employer partners. You’re living in a world where your own boss expects you to get more done with fewer resources (sounds like the career center world too, right? ;).

And so now you, too, have a choice:

  • Do you tell your team NOT to use AI because it’s too new and scary?
  • Or do you get them using it ASAP so you can turbocharge their performance and keep your own job?

I think you know what most bosses are choosing - in fact 91% now say they want their employees to have AI skills. And that’s exactly what I’ve told my own team at Khan Academy: If you’re not using AI, you’re wasting our scarce nonprofit resources and limiting the number of kids we could serve.

So to help your partners and better prepare your students to succeed in their roles, AI expertise is important in general, not just for job searching.

For Yourself

Finally, let’s get right down to it: For better or worse, we career coaches serve at the pleasure of our students.

And that means we get evaluated on two metrics:

  • Quantitative: Did our students actually get jobs?
  • Qualitative: Were they happy with their experience with us?

So AI lets you pursue your own twin stars:

The bottom line is that whether it’s for your students’ careers or your own, it’s critical that you lead from the front here.

PS: Feel free to share with your colleagues! And if you ever want me to lead an AI training for your students or colleagues this year, just say the word.