How to prompt ChatGPT to be a career coach

Discover the most effective prompts for using ChatGPT as your personal career advisor

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an incredibly versatile tool with a wide range of applications, including serving as your personal career coach with just a few simple prompts. If you’re looking for guidance in your professional journey, read on.

Why consider ChatGPT as your career coach?

Imagine having access to a tool that has analysed countless career paths, job market trends, and professional development strategies. A program that can offer unbiased advice at any time of day, guiding you through the intricacies of modern career paths. ChatGPT can assist with resume writing, interview preparation, skill assessment, and career planning, all tailored to your unique situation.

Whether you’re a recent graduate entering the job market, a professional considering a career change, or someone looking to climb the corporate ladder, ChatGPT, when prompted as a career coach, offers a convenient and insightful way to explore your options and develop your professional path.

ChatGPT as a career coach

So what exactly is ChatGPT, and how does it emulate the thinking and methodology of a career coach? ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM), which means it’s a highly sophisticated piece of software capable of understanding and mimicking human interaction. While ChatGPT doesn’t have its own beliefs, emotions, or consciousness, it can generate informative, engaging, and even motivational text based on its training.

You can think of ChatGPT as having absorbed information from a vast library of career-related resources: books on professional development, articles on industry trends, and countless job descriptions and career advice columns. This extensive training doesn’t mean it fully understands or experiences careers firsthand, but it can generate valuable insights and advice because it has analysed how humans write and think about career development.

When you ask ChatGPT to take on the role of a career coach, it generates responses based on patterns it learned during its training. Through its pre-trained data, it understands how career coaches operate, the information they typically draw upon, and the methods they use to guide their clients.

Here's how ChatGPT works as a career coach

To understand how ChatGPT interprets and executes the role of a career coach, let’s look at its approach. According to ChatGPT itself, when embodying the role of a career coach, it would:

Listen actively: Understand the client’s goals, challenges, and current situation through open-ended questions.
Provide clarity: Help define their career objectives, whether it’s a job search, career change, or advancement.
Assess strengths and weaknesses: Guide the client in evaluating their skills and areas for improvement.
Identify opportunities: Suggest potential career paths based on the client’s strengths and market trends.
Set goals: Assist in establishing realistic, actionable short-term and long-term career goals.
Develop strategies: Offer practical advice on resumes, interviews, networking, and skill-building.
Encourage and hold accountable: Motivate the client while tracking progress toward goals.
Stay current: Share insights on job market trends, emerging skills, and relevant learning opportunities.
Provide feedback: Give constructive feedback and foster self-reflection to encourage improvement.
Adapt to needs: Tailor coaching as the client’s career path evolves, ensuring a dynamic, supportive process.

Limitations of ChatGPT as a career coach

While ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for career guidance, it’s important to recognise its limitations. Firstly, it lacks personal knowledge of you and doesn’t have real-world experience in specific industries or roles. It’s also not licensed or certified in any professional field, including career coaching.

Its role as a career coach is based on analysing and synthesising information from its training data rather than personal expertise. Additionally, it can’t remember past interactions unless they are part of the same conversation.

ChatGPT is also a generalist program. This characteristic has both advantages and drawbacks. Its training on vast amounts of data means its guidance tends to be broad and generally applicable. However, this also means it may not always provide the highly specialized advice that some careers or industries require. Read more about how much AI is a threat to coaches.

Prompting ChatGPT to be a career coach

Getting the best out of ChatGPT takes practice and skill. There’s no one perfect way to do it, but some methods work better than others. We’ll share two prompts you can use to transform ChatGPT into your personal career coach.

Simple ChatGPT career coach prompt

“Assume the role of a career coach”

Starting a conversation with this simple prompt will engage ChatGPT in a dialogue aimed at understanding your current career situation, aspirations, and challenges. It can then offer guidance and advice based on this understanding. Here’s an example of how it might begin:

Even with such a basic prompt, ChatGPT will provide you with a helpful and productive exchange. It can ask follow-up questions to gain more context and better understand your needs.

However, while this prompt can be effective, it lacks specificity. It doesn’t provide much guidance on what career topics you want to discuss or what kind of assistance you’re seeking. This could lead to a more general, and potentially less useful, conversation.

Providing more specific information in your prompt can help guide ChatGPT’s responses and make the conversation more efficient and effective.

Advanced ChatGPT career coach prompt

“Take on the role of an experienced career coach specialising in [your industry or desired career field]. My current position is [describe your current job and company]. My career goals are [outline your professional objectives]. Begin an interactive conversation where you explore my current circumstances, my career aspirations, and any obstacles I face in achieving them. Then, propose potential strategies I can implement to progress towards my career goals.”

You can copy and paste this prompt into ChatGPT, completing the sections in square brackets. Feel free to modify other parts of the prompt to better suit your specific needs.

This type of prompt gets to the point much quicker, providing context and direction for ChatGPT to offer specific career guidance almost immediately. The best way to gauge its effectiveness is to try it out yourself!

Continuing the conversation

Beyond the initial prompt, it’s crucial to maintain an effective conversation. Since language models can’t pick up on non-verbal cues like body language or tone of voice, everything you communicate must be through the words you type. This means you need to be clear and precise in your wording – don’t leave room for misinterpretation.

LLMs perform best when you are clear, concise, and detailed. Be specific in your answers and requests to get the most valuable output. If ChatGPT’s response isn’t what you expected, you can always rephrase your question or ask for clarification.

As you would with any coach, try to be open, honest, and clear while avoiding sharing sensitive personal information. It’s best to assume that anything you enter could potentially become public.

If you’re a job seeker looking for more targeted assistance with your job search, try using a prompt like this: “Act as a job search strategist specialising in [your field]. Help me develop a comprehensive plan to find and secure a position as a [your desired role].”

If you’re in a senior or leadership style role, try out how to prompt ChatGPT as an executive coach or this leadership coach prompt.

Final thoughts

ChatGPT opens up new ways to grow your career. It acts like a career coach, giving you a friendly place to think about your work life without feeling judged. By asking the right questions, you can have great talks about your job dreams and problems, tapping into all the knowledge ChatGPT has learned. While it can’t replace real career experts, ChatGPT can be a handy helper in your career journey. It gives you ideas and plans to boost your confidence as you move forward in your work life. With ChatGPT, you have a supportive partner ready to help you aim high and achieve your career goals.