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.