Utilizing AI to Advance Your Career and Secure a Promotion Quicker

• AI technology can enable individuals to discover new opportunities and enhance their professional abilities more quickly.
• This could potentially make career transitions more achievable across jobs and even industries.

The use of artificial intelligence in education may result in changes in the way workers obtain credentials and qualifications. With the help of accessible generative AI, individuals may be able to explore new career paths and acquire new skills at a faster pace, experts predict, making it easier for them to transition between jobs and industries.

Lareina Yee, senior partner at McKinsey, stated that people with less tenure or experience are more likely to embrace AI technology as it helps them demonstrate their expertise faster. Strategic AI usage can speed up the time it takes for workers to reach peak performance in their role, which is typically the first year of a job in corporate America.

"Climbing the expertise ladder faster can help you achieve your objectives better, perform better, and potentially improve your performance review, get promoted faster, or simply enjoy your job," Yee stated.

A McKinsey report from 2022 reveals that role transitions are inherent in labor markets. As human capital (defined as "knowledge, attributes, skills, experience and health" of the worker) increases, so does the potential for upward mobility. The report found that approximately half of those who moved roles received pay increases, with earnings increasing upwards of 45% with each transition.

Karen Panetta, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and dean of graduate education at Tufts School of Engineering, believes that AI will revolutionize the way work is done in the future. She asserts that AI will excel at removing the barriers to exceptional learning, thereby making it easier for individuals to enter fields that currently require expensive education. According to Panetta, this technological advancement will be a game-changer.

Khan Academy founder Sal Khan has partnered with OpenAI to launch Khanmigo, a generative AI platform that aims to assist learners and teachers. Khanmigo positions itself as a "tutor for learners" and an "assistant for teachers." In a podcast with Bill Gates, Khan highlights the inaccessibility of live tutors as a significant barrier to educational success, arguing that AI assistance can help students achieve their educational goals and access professional opportunities they may not have had access to otherwise.

All Star Code, a nonprofit organization, had a scholar create a 30-second video using Runway's generative AI platform to visualize their progress in their tech career over the next decade. This simple act of envisioning possibilities can significantly impact a young person's long-term trajectory.

The importance of successful career transitions

Career transitions can enhance individuals' lives by improving job satisfaction and promoting social mobility, and AI can facilitate this process by making education more accessible. "It's so accessible to everyone," Yee stated. "It's not just for data scientists anymore, as analytical AI was before last year."

Although it may take time for the transformation of credentialing to occur and for professionals to incorporate AI-based learning into their hiring processes, obtaining qualifications and securing a job in the industry are two separate tasks.

The final decision in career transitions, even with AI assistance, is made by humans. Panetta believes that the role of humans in hiring, regardless of the qualifications of candidates, will be crucial in career transitions. "Ultimately, it is a human being who decides whether or not to hire someone," she said. "Bias gets propagated to the output."

According to Panetta, the bias that humans feed hiring-assistive AI to identify desirable characteristics in employees may not always capture the full range of success scenarios. She explained, "They haven't established the foundation for training the AI to recognize all the different scenarios." This is where the problem lies.

With the increased capabilities of AI to help people envision new futures, there is a barrier between what is currently possible and what could be.

Yee suggests that generative AI can assist individuals in determining the necessary steps to pursue a specific career, such as asking ChatGPT about the requirements to become a software engineer or starting the learning process with platforms like Inflection AI and Pi AI.

As an educator and engineer, Panetta describes AI as systems that enable us to explore and expand our knowledge of the universe. These tools may inspire individuals to push the boundaries of their own capabilities.