Using AI to Upskill, Stand Out, and Stay Relevant in Your Career

AI isn’t just for tech roles or automation; it’s a powerful tool for anyone looking to grow, pivot, or future-proof their career. In this episode, Jill discusses using AI to enhance strategic thinking, prep for interviews, and strengthen your job search.

You’ll learn:

• How to use AI to identify transferable skills and tailor your resume
• Why most people write bad prompts, and how to fix that
• Smart ways to integrate AI into your career planning and professional brand

Show Notes:

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Career Refresh
• 1:01 AI's Impact on Different Industries
• 5:22 Using AI as Your Second Brain
• 8:25 Writing Effective AI Prompts
• 10:16 AI for Job Search and Interviews
• 12:09 AI Tools and Privacy Considerations
• 15:37 Final Thoughts on AI Adaptation

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, welcome to the Career Refresh. Listen, whether you are thinking about a reinvention, refining your executive presence or building a team that thrives, this is where we're going to talk about the guidance and insights you need in order to make that happen. I'm Jill Griffin, I'm an executive coach, I am a strategist and I'm a former media executive. I spent the last 25 years working my way up and through the ranks of multiple corporations and startups and working with the world's top brands and leading teams through strategic growth, through transition, through communications planning all of the above. Today, I help high performers and their teams align their strengths and really tackle both the team dynamics and the organizational goals so that they can thrive in today's workplace, which is ever-changing, and that's what we're also talking about today change. Today, we're talking about something that is exciting, confusing, scary. All of the above AI. Ai in the job search and in the workplace. More specifically, it's about how to stay relevant, grow your career and lead with intention. That in a world that is shifting really fast, and we want you to stay relevant, so let us dig in, okay, whether you're job searching, managing a team or thinking about your next big move, there's a lot of noise around AI and it is absolutely shifting how you work. That is not new to you, you've already heard that. But it's thinking about that. Tasks are being automated and job descriptions are evolving. It's creating questions like is this going to replace me? What do I need to learn here? Do I have to learn code? And how does staying relevant in this moving goalpost marketplace what does it look like? The bottom rung of the career ladder, as it's being called? Right, the knowledge worker? That shift is happening, but that was happening before this explosion of AI. Right, covid impacted the hiring and nurturing of young professionals too. So these entry-level roles data analysis, research, even copywriting are definitely being restructured and AI is absorbing the task. Research, even copywriting, are definitely being restructured and AI is absorbing the tasks, but it doesn't mean it's replacing humans, or I should say, yet it's replacing the tasks. So we need to be thinking about that. It's a recalibration and how we want to shift.

Speaker 1: 2:20

So, whether that means evolving early career, or what success mid-career looks like, or if you're further along in your career, I want you to be thinking about new ways of being indispensable, and that is about creating the through line of relevance. Right, it's not about knowing every single tool and every single software out there. It's about how to use them wisely and think differently. Listen, I have a client right now who is using AI to train herself on AI, meaning she is saying, based on her career, what does she need to know? And AI has written her a plan of what she needs to do each week over the next six weeks to get up to speed on something. You could do that too. You could absolutely do that too. So I want to talk about what I'm saying. I'm going to say like eight smart ways to use AI and stay relevant.

Speaker 1: 3:04

The first is I want you to think about how it's impacting your industry specifically. Right, you're hearing about things around tech and engineering. Well, if you don't do that for a living, that's just kind of feels like overwhelm and fear for fear's sake. So I want you to get clear. If you are in tech, right, it is absolutely accelerating the way code is generated, bug detection and even QA, testing and entry-level roles. They are definitely being compressed, but platforms are, you know, using more boilerplates. Like you know, a GitHub copilot, right, is reducing the need for junior engineers because it is actually giving you more boilerplates. But you want to be thinking about how you want to focus more on systems thinking, product intuition and product design and also architecture. So you're in finance, right, where analysts used to spend hours pulling and cleaning data and making sure we had data hygiene right, doing that in Excel. Well, now, obviously, ai is summarizing those reports and flagging anomalies much faster, but the work again doesn't go away. It's about understanding the strategic insight and communications that are more important than ever.

Speaker 1: 4:14

If you're in product, thinking about AI is influencing roadmaps and how roadmaps are being prioritized. Teams are using AI to analyze, you know, usage patterns, customer feedback, competitor behavior and data you should be thinking about. It's about not the code, but how you can connect the dots between discovery, design and testing. That's an opportunity within product where you can use AI tools but still put the human thinking on things. And then again, I can't go through every industry, but if you're, you know, in something around advertising or marketing or sales, right, there's obviously they're using it for copy and A-B testing. But the shift where we still need strategists to be the editor, to curate the ideas and not just be the creator, it's like it's not about coming up with everything. It's about coming up with the right things. So that's just some of the ways that I'm seeing AI impact the job descriptions and the actual department.

Speaker 1: 5:15

Second thing I want you to think about is that, using AI as a co-pilot I call it the second brain. I've also heard other people call it that right, it's like you're the driver. Ai is the GPS. So if you're using it to brainstorm, summarize, draft or prep, you're using your own judgment. It's just how it scales you, it's not how it replaces you. And then there are extensions where you can add on to Chrome to make sure that when you're creating something, you can say is this AI generated?

Speaker 1: 5:45

You can drop it in there and actually be able to see does this sound like blah, blah, blah, you know very anodyne and very rote, or does it sound like you can use AI as an outline and then put in your own human touch on it? We're not looking for perfection. We're not looking to make everything. I mean, you see it. You see it. If you scroll sites, especially like LinkedIn, or if you're on Substack, you see when something is AI generated, because I feel like the heart and soul has been taken out of the document or the content and you're just sort of like, yeah, right, so we don't want to sound flat or bland. It's like if you ever read like a Wikipedia. You don't want to sound like that. But we also can have really flowery language. Or AI always writes in this contrast where it'll always say like it's not about blah, it's about blah. That's an AI giveaway.

Speaker 1: 6:37

For some reason, someone decided that everything has to be a compare and contrast. It's a great way of seeing if AI is being used. So don't do that. Right? You want to make sure that if you give AI a generic prompt, it's going to give you generic content, right? The model can't guess the context. That's what it needs you to bring to the situation.

Speaker 1: 7:01

So giving it a clear persona when you're asking questions, that matches the task. So asking things that are based on your tone, brand and voice and style. You can even ask in AI, based on everything I've put in here, what is my tone and style, and see what it spits back to you. If you agree with that, then when you write in the future, you're giving it a prompt that says and you know, make it crisp, make it strategic, make it witty, whatever your tone and style is, that you can put in there. So for acting for like, if you're going for a marketing job, you want to be thinking about asking a question like act like a conversion psychologist who writes landing page that triggers buyer emotion right, that is going to give you a level of specificity that you didn't expect before. If you're in data, asking it just for generic storytelling based on the data okay, right, you know, just for generic storytelling based on the data Okay, right, but you want to skip to act like a storytelling analyst that is turning metrics into slides for the board right For the board presentation. Asking it that level of specificity. That is when you're asking it specific, the more tailored, the more strategic, the more useful it is and it's not going to sound rote, all right.

Speaker 1: 8:18

Next, focusing on use cases, there is thinking about how to use AI. I want you to also start with curiosity. There is a gentleman named Ruman Hassad. I'll put his link in the show notes. He's on LinkedIn and I find that he puts out a lot of really good content and ways of thinking about things differently and writing really good prompts. So, if you're in marketing, use AI to generate 10 subject emails Sure, fine, but have it. Summarize the customer reviews that you see to spot trends that you can act on.

Speaker 1: 8:53

If you're in HR obviously using AI to draft the first level of the job description and analyze sort of the tone from exit interviews, employee engagement studies how are you pulling all that together to get ahead of any questions that might be asked for you during the search process? It can be sure, summarizing pages of data, but also asking it to prep the you know, the quarterly meeting notes, or using concise commentary. Or, if you have to go to an earnings call, have you ever provided data for an earnings call? It can be quite terrifying, so being able to ask it that right, right. So the specific questions. And then, if you're in product or innovation or tech, asking it what-if scenarios? Right, and see if you could pressure test your thinking and thinking about things in different ways. You also may want to think about context, for how do I think about this in three, six and 12 months? Right, asking it. How do I think about, you know, building a RACI or a RACI? Right, responsible, accountable, consulted, informed. How do I think about that for the key stakeholders? Right, different ways of using AI with curiosity and focusing on like use cases.

Speaker 1: 10:12

Next, I want you to think about how you might audit your transferable skills. So, if you're using AI to pivot or reinvent and help you find a new position, you might compare your resume to the job posting and see where it overlaps. You might also want to help it, help you reframe your experience to use in language that still feels authentic to you but also hits on the keywords and phrases that are in the resume excuse me, that are in the job description, so that you could use those both on your resume and, if it requires a cover letter, your cover letter. Right, if things feel good and true, you may also want to pepper in that language into your LinkedIn profile, making sure that it's consistent. You never want a situation in which your resume says one thing and your LinkedIn profile says something that feels unaligned, because people are going to be like okay, will a real Jill please stand up. They're not going to know where it is.

Speaker 1: 11:04

Next thing, I want you to think about AI for simulating real world scenarios. This is going to take practice, but it's low key, right? So you might ask AI to run a mock interview with you and, based on this job description, your resumes, what questions might it ask you? Right, asking you questions, or ask it to be tough on you and ask you questions. Right, this is going to help build your reflexes and make you sharper and be thinking it through ahead of time. You may also ask it to interview you from different styles right Structured. You may also ask it to interview you from different styles right Structured, unstructured, semi-structured, behavioral or situational right. You could even prompt it for asking you on a panel interview or include the titles of the cast of characters that might be there. So, again, that you can practice not only the questions but some of the answers based on your resume. Again, we're not lying here. This has to be authentic and it has to be you.

Speaker 1: 11:58

Next, I want you to experiment, but I want you to know the guardrails. So there's a lot of conversation in a lot of my HR and CIO circles where people are getting a little bit nervous. I just had a conversation of a general counsel of a law firm oh boy. So before you copy and paste company data into a chatbot, make sure you're aware of your company's actual AI policies. If you're in those positions, make sure that people know where to find them, because you can use AI responsibly, maybe for drafts and some ideation, but not for confidential work unless it's been secured and approved by your company's policy.

Speaker 1: 12:36

And I'll tell you a little personal story here. Right, I was writing a framework for work and I was using AI to help me. Like, sometimes it was a little bit wordy, so I was like making this crisp, make this concise how would you say this through this lens and making it better, right? So I was using it to fine tune something. That scene Well, someone scheduled a perspective appointment with me and they knew information that I hadn't made public. So the stuff that I was using to fine tune, they actually knew that. They shared with me what they pulled out of AI and what AI said about me. And it was really funny, right. The prospective client said they found me because of the prompts they were using and it delivered me. So, yay, awesome. But it also made me someone I wasn't and it took the information that I was fine tuning and put it out there, right. So there's enough information about me between public content, this podcast, newsletter, social, but this was funny that it actually mixed all those things together and this new pieces. So, look, it's just my way of saying nothing is private, nothing is confidential, so use it with care.

Speaker 1: 13:49

Okay, next, I want you to think about the obvious, about saving time, maybe asking for summarizing reports, extracting key points. I use Phantom or Fathom AI recorder and I love the notes. If I'm in a meeting, I'm on the board and for an organization and if there's a lot of people there, it's a lot to take notes and having it do that. I do pay for it. I think it's like a hundred bucks a year or so If that feels right for you. They also have a cap on how often you can use it. There are places like Granola AI or Otter AI. There are plenty of tools out there that can really make your life easier. Again, assuming what you're talking about is not highly confidential. So also asking like, based on my calendar, what can you do for me today? Is it drafting email? Is it organizing key themes that you need to give feedback on? It's not looking to create more work for you, it's just finding ways that you can use your brain then for the higher touch areas of strategy, connection and building relationship and networking and finding those insights.

Speaker 1: 14:55

And then, lastly, I want you to think about what prompts you can ask based on what you're always doing, so you might say if you're looking for a job. Instead of saying, write a cover letter, you might say something like act as a recruiter based on this job posting and my resume. Write a confident, concise cover letter that highlights my leadership and transferable skills. You don't just want to repeat your resume in a cover letter, but that might be a way of using it in contextual space that makes it you know you're thinking about writing prompts, because the better you can write prompts, the better the information you're going to get, and then the less generic it's going to be, all right. The last part I want to talk about is what my this is my opinion. Not everyone is going to agree with this, but there are plenty of tools and I want to talk about the big three. So chat, gpt I call it chat EG open AI right. You want to think about it for reframing your resume bullets, prepping for interviews. It may draft headlines or bios, right. Simulate the interview, get feedback on your questions right Things that it's all great at.

Speaker 1: 16:02

Google's Gemini you might want to use it within your Gmail, your Docs Sheets, lives, right. Writing, networking emails, summarizing job descriptions. Maybe you're comparing multiple spreadsheets, but everything within that Google universe really, really helpful and great for organizing your job search. And then I also really like Claude by Anthropic, which this is great when you're dealing with a lot of content, right. It might summarize your job description, analyze reports, review a body of work, right. Really really good for anything that's more complex that you're doing. And I just find that it also writes in a more human way. It doesn't sound as I think it's harder to figure out that a clawed AI result is actually by AI, versus like Gemini or ChatGPT. I think it's really obvious when you get something there if you haven't put your human touch on it.

Speaker 1: 16:59

Okay, final thoughts Whether you're job searching, pivoting, building something bigger or stepping into what next, it's obviously going to help you stay agile, adaptable and it's going to be a requirement for your job.

Speaker 1: 17:11

So, making sure it's on your resume. I want to see the word AI on your resume and even if you're using it within your job search, I want to make sure that you're saying that because, again, you're going to want to know that you're using it. Making sure that the people that you're communicating with that you're scrubbing it so that the people that you're communicating with aren't looking at it being like who wrote this, but using it to ask better questions, stay curious and making sure that the tech is serving your vision and not the other way around. All right, friends, if this episode was helpful, share it with a friend, a colleague or someone who might be secretly stressing out that they're falling behind on AI. And if you're ready for what's next in your career, I would love to help. You can visit my website, griffinmethodcom, and get information about working with me for individual coaching, career strategy, working with teams and team dynamics. Or just say hello, all right friends, until next time, be curious, intentional and always, always.