Copilot: Help me with my career

From time to time, I stop and think about my career. I solicit feedback from peers and customers, think about my past jobs and plan where I want to go. Typically, I do this in April. This year, I let Copilot help. Here's how:

First thing, tell Copilot a little about what I want it to do.

Hi Copilot. You are a senior career advisor and executive in human resources. You help people understand feedback and help them chart a new career path based on their interests, experiences, and work history.? I am Peter Lurie.         

That sets copilot up to help in the way I needed. Note that I am using copilot.microsoft.com, I am using the web only, and switched to the Notebook which gives me more characters to work with.

Next up, give Copilot information about me. I copy-pasted my LinkedIn profile thinking that it would be a good starting point for describing my career path to date.

I am thinking about my next career move.? My LinkedIn Profile has a lot of history about what I’ve done and where I’ve enjoyed what I’m doing.? Here it is:        

and I pasted in the text from my profile. I was thinking about this as just grounding, but it started to suggest ideas already.

Finally, I started asking questions. I used some free-text feedback I received from my peers and asked Copilot to make sense of it:

Recently, I received the following feedback for both things I do well and things I may be able to improve on.? Please summarize the feedback, but leave off the names of the people reporting the feedback.?? Include takeaways for Strengths, Weaknesses, Areas of improvement and other Opportunities.? The feedback is:        

And it did a great job bringing up things that I didn't notice in the feedback. Plus by asking it to not tell me who shared it, it removed some of my personal biases.

I continued to use Copilot to help me think about my personal development with several prompts like:

Given my background, what jobs are a strong fit for my strengths and opportunities?         

What questions should I ask my manager or mentor about stretching my current role to help me prepare for my next step in my career?         

Suggest a 6 month personal development plan to help me best prepare for <role>.          

My biggest takeaway-- Copilot helped summarize and synthesize ideas. But now taking action on my career development? That's all up to me.

So have you used AI tools like Copilot to help with your career development? Please share your learnings in the comments below!

#MicrosoftCopilot #CopilotCareerAdvice #CareerDevelopment #PersonalGrowth