AI is changing work, but the fundamentals of career growth still apply. These three habits help you stay relevant and advance your career in the age of AI.
Happy new year! The start of each new year brings a combination of optimism and fear. There is opportunity to achieve new goals but pressure and anxiety about what may change. As we reset expectations and goals for ourselves, often in health and relationships, we should make sure to think about our careers, too. Having taught career skills to thousands of people at MIT and tens of thousands around the world, I want to help you start the year off right.
Last year I wrote “Achieve Career Success in the New Year: 3 Powerful Tips.” The advice stands, but in case you’d like something a little more aligned with AI, here’s my advice for this year to make sure you start on the right foot. Whether you’re looking to advance your career, find a new job, or just stay ahead of the pace of change, follow these three simple tips.
If AI still scares you, that’s understandable, but you can’t ignore it. You need to have not just general knowledge of AI but make sure you know how to use it for your job. Obviously, you can do a web search for articles and videos on “AI for <profession>.” Don’t just have a passing understanding but know concretely how to use it to do specific things. One easy way to do that is to have AI help you. It can create a lesson plan, walk you through learning, and create specific exercises for you.
I gave it the following prompt
I am a <profession>. I keep hearing that AI is important for my job and that I will be using it. I need to learn more about it. I want you to create a lesson plan to: 1. Teach me the fundamentals of AI 2. Teach me how AI will be used in my job 3. Give me specific activities to try so I can practice and develop my skills. Can you give me a 10 part plan that takes 15-20 minutes a day?
It created a plan. I did this with the general ChatGPT (not the deeper research mode), so I then had to tell it to flesh out each step. Some other prompts you could try include:
For that third one, you want to be very specific. Don’t say, “I wrote an email” but rather, “I sent an email to the events team about how the Q4 event numbers seemed low, but the revenue was still on target and made suggestions for how we could understand why and what to do in the future.”
In other words, you can use an LLM like a personal tutor to help you learn how to use it. I sometimes ask it to slow down and re-explain something in English (not the domain language of the subject I’m learning about), or to define each term.
As AI democratizes knowledge, soft skills will become more important. Here’s a list of ten soft skills that companies emphasize. If you’d like a more granular list so you can be more focused on a topic, use the list below. Pick one. I want to emphasize that again: pick just one and focus on that skill.
Don’t try to do too much. Pick one skill and work on it for five minutes a day for a month, or thirty minutes a week for a month (depending on whether you like smaller activities or more focused effort). It could mean reading an article or chapter of a book or listening to a podcast or video. (If you need some podcast suggestions, you can hear me speak about some of these skills in 300+ podcast appearances.)
Or, as above, you could ask AI for help. Ask AI to create a lesson plan for you on that topic. Ask for key points and also for specific exercises you can do. Again, this can be two dozen five-minute lessons or a few thirty-minute lessons.
After a month, do a check-in. Do you feel you’ve made enough progress? If not, perhaps you like the new skill and want to get even better, keep going. If you think you're ok where you are, only then should you consider focusing on a different skill. Keep in mind that it takes at least two to three months of practice to really build up the skill and not backslide much when you shift your focus. When losing weight, you may lose a few pounds in the first week or two, but meaningful, sustained weight loss takes months; learning is similar.
On the resources page of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You is The Career Toolkit Development Program, which is a great way to get others at your company to develop these skills with you. Just as you’re more likely to keep going to the gym if you’re doing it with friends, developing these skills is easier when you’re doing it with others. And while you don’t need the book The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You, if you do have it, The Career Toolkit Development Program Cycles breaks down the book into bite-sized training steps (the Bi-weekly cycle and the Chapter cycle are the two you’ll most likely want to use).
And as always, network. Set a calendar reminder every month that says, “Reach out to someone in my network.” When this comes up, look through your LinkedIn connections or other set of contacts and find someone you haven’t spoken to in a year or more. The article “60 Seconds to Better Networking” has an outreach email template you can copy and paste.
For those who want to use AI, it’s able to help you here, too. Sure, AI can write the outreach email. It can also review your contacts and create a list. If it has access to your email, it can see who you haven’t spoken to in a while. You can even ask AI to check the social media posts of the people you’re reaching out to and summarize what they’ve been doing the past year (or however long it’s been) so you can personalize the outreach.
As with learning, this is a habit, not a one-and-done event. Consistent outreach and relationship building, even in small steps, is better than sending fifty emails at once and then doing nothing the rest of the year.
Yes, the advice is a bit similar to last year. Solid advice often doesn’t change much from one year to the next. How to execute it, however, has become much easier thanks to LLMs.
This may seem like a lot but remember it’s just a few small steps. Thirty minutes a week of learning AI and another thirty for working on soft skills (so 50 hours of learning throughout the year compared to 2,000 hours of work). The outreach takes just a few minutes a week. Small steps each, but together they will take you far; like compounding interest over time, small efforts yield large results.
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