When you’re looking to return to work after an extended break, knowing how and where to get started can sometimes be the hardest step. If you’re in need of a helping hand, artificial intelligence (AI) tools might just be the thing to help kickstart your journey.
What is AI
AI is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy. There are lots of AI tools to choose from and here’s a few popular ones: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google) and Microsoft 365 Copilot (Microsoft).
What can AI help with
AI can help you with most aspects of your return to work journey from generating different job ideas to explore, understanding what skills and experience are required for different roles, helping you think about your transferable skills, refining sections of your CV or LinkedIn profile and generating typical interview questions for different roles to help with your interview prep!
How to get started
If you’re completely new to AI, then we’d recommend getting started with one tool. ChatGPT is free to use, intuitive and user friendly so is a good one to experiment with. Google ‘Open AI’ and this will take you to their home page where you can download ChatGPT, set up a free account and get started. You’ll be greeted with a ‘What can I help you with’ open box, and this is where you type in your question or ‘prompt’ that you’d like to ask. The more specific and detailed your prompt, the better response you’ll receive. Once you’ve asked your first question, you can then ask additional questions to help you refine the information you’re receiving.
Prompt examples
1. Making a career switch or change: ‘I’m a qualified accountant but would like to work in compliance and risk roles in the insurance sector. What skills and experience will I need to develop?’ ChatGPT generated a list of skills and experience to develop with helpful examples of how to build it, different courses and certifications that might be helpful, as well as steps to making that transition.
2. Identifying transferable skills from career break activities: ‘I’m an experienced project manager. Whilst on my career break, I volunteered at my local church, helping with fundraising events in the community. What additional transferable skills did I build during my career break that I can bring with me to my next professional role in the finance sector’. Here ChatGPT generated a long list of skills and then detailed how these might transfer across to different roles. It also illustrated how you might position these skills and experience at interview.
3. Tailoring your CV to a specific job: ‘Please tailor my CV to this role: copy and paste your current CV (removing all personal data), then copy and paste the job description’. Chat GPT can help you to tailor your CV to the specific role you’re going for, ensuring your CV contains the key words that will be screened for automatically by an organisation’s applicant tracking system. This will hopefully get your CV through the first screen and in front of a human! Do check for accuracy though and that what’s captured accurately reflects you and your experience!
4. Creating a dynamic personal profile on LinkedIn: ‘How would you improve my LinkedIn Profile: Copy and paste current LinkedIn About section’. ChatGPT does an impressive job of taking your current text and optimising it for clarity, keywords, storytelling, and engagement. It gives tips on what to include in your LinkedIn headline, what skills to add in the skills section to improve keyword visibility and reinforce your expertise, and different ways to engage on LinkedIn.
5. Generating typical Interview questions: ‘What are some typical interview questions that might be asked for this job: Copy and paste Job Description from relevant jobs board’. ChatGPT generates a list of questions for the different skills and expertise sought. It also lists different behavioural ‘competency’ questions i.e. tell me about a time when… as well as ‘why are you interested in working for our company’ questions. As a bonus, it also creates a set of questions that you could ask your interviewer!
A word of caution….
While this all sounds fantastic, we do want to sound a cautionary note! Never put personal or sensitive info or data such as your name, address, mobile number, financial info etc into an AI tool. AI tools train on the data that’s input so your personal data won’t necessarily remain private!
Do view AI as a tool to assist you, not to do the job for you. It will respond to your prompt with a detailed answer – some of the detail will be relevant to your skills and experience, but some won’t be. Always take what’s shared, check for accuracy and then adapt it to make it authentic to you and bring it to life with your real examples of strengths, skills, experience and achievements.
