Using AI as Your Personal Career Coach

Learn how to use AI to help you advance and plan your longer-term trajectory.

Before You Start

Goal: Learn how to use AI to frame your accomplishments in impact language and advise you on important career conversations.

Watch: Using AI as Your Personal Career Coach — Members are encouraged to watch beforehand, but a quick recap at the meeting works too.

AI can help you assess the skills you need to get promoted, frame your accomplishments in impact language, pressure-test your positioning, and think through your longer-term trajectory.

Meeting Agenda · Approx. 60 mins

  • Member Updates · 10 mins
  • Icebreaker · 10 mins
  • Activities · 20 mins
  • One Action · 10 mins
  • Wrap-Up · 5 mins

👋 Member Updates · 10 mins

Go around your Circle and share personal updates. Keep them brief and focused on significant changes or important decisions since the last time you met. It's OK not to have one every month. If you have a One Action update from last time, share that too.

🧊 Icebreaker · 10 mins

Invite everyone in the group to share. Keep answers to one or two minutes per person.

If you had access to a brilliant career coach, what would you ask them first?

🏋️ Activity 1 · 10 mins

Think through your longer-term trajectory

  1. Upload your resume, or share your job title and your three most recent past job titles with your preferred AI tool. Also share your ideal future role.
  2. Consider using Lean In's new AI career coach. Our coach gives research-backed advice tailored for women, whereas regular AI tools give advice that tends to work better for men.
  3. Ask the AI: "Given my background and where I want to go, what skills should I be building in the next 12 months? What experiences would make me a stronger candidate for the role I'm working toward?"
  4. Then ask: "What does the path from where I am to where I want to be typically look like? What do people who make that move successfully tend to have in common?"
  5. Share with the group: What did you learn? What surprised you? Are you going to take any actions, based on what you learned from the AI's response?

🏋️ Activity 2 · 10 mins

Pressure-test an important career conversation

  1. Open an AI tool and make notes on what you're planning to say in one of these contexts: your performance review, a feedback conversation with your manager, or your case for a raise or another benefit. Then ask AI to poke holes. Make sure you tell it your role and your boss's role, and prompt it to give you advice, based on rigorous research, on how women can get the most out of the conversation.

  2. Review the AI's output, and try adding more context to the prompt to get a better result.

  3. Share with the group: What were the results like? How did you change your prompt in step 2, and did it lead to a better result?

🎯 One Action · 10 mins

Commit to one concrete action — big or small — you'll take before next meeting. Go around the Circle and share (1 minute or less per member). Vocalizing it helps hold each other accountable.

Use AI as a career coach in the next month in at least one of the ways described in the video. Come to the next meeting ready to share what you learned and what you did differently as a result.

📅 Wrap-Up · 5 mins

Before you break, plan your next meeting and close on an energetic note. Go around your Circle one by one and finish the sentence:

Now I am feeling… (choose one word).

  • Set the day, time, and location
  • Choose the next topic or resource
  • Confirm who's leading the discussion
  • Decide how you'll stay in touch in between