Even though the majority of professionals (including myself) are watching the advancement of AI tools with bated breath, and wondering how these technologies will transform the career landscape in the years to come, sometimes you just have to give credit where credit is due.
Case in point: if you’re one of the many individuals toying with the idea of making a career change, one great place to start your brainstorming efforts is to simply run a suitable prompt on one of the many free AI tools out there (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, etc.) and ask the site to suggest some career alternatives related to your profession. The key in doing this, as noted below, is to be very specific in your request — and ask the tool to produce a sizeable number of results so that it doesn’t just spit back a handful of obvious suggestions in return.
Here’s some examples of what these kinds of prompts might look like:
- What are the top 100 career alternatives for teachers?
- What are 50 career choices that are good for people with analytical skills?
- What are the 50 fastest-growing occupations?
- What are 100 jobs that involve working with children?
- What are 25 careers that involve selling but aren’t sales jobs?
- What are 50 new careers that didn’t exist 10 years ago?
- What are the top 20 careers that pay the most for new college graduates?
- What are 50 careers that don’t require a college degree?
- What are 100 jobs that are going to be needed 10 years from now?
- What 50 occupations are best for a person with ADHD?
This list is obviously just the tip of the iceberg and the sky is truly the limit in terms of the different ways you can use these sites to explore potential career avenues. Granted, the lists that get generated may not be quite as creative as what you could generate with a more well-rounded and intensive research strategy — and these sites can’t give any indication of how qualified you’d be for each possibility — but again, as a free starting point, these kinds of queries can produce some surprisingly practical and compelling results.
One of the reasons AI is so effective at this process? It’s due to a factor that often gets overlooked by people contemplating a career shift — which is that outside of a few really unique situations, there’s almost always “precedent” in terms of people in your field who have made similar transitions before you. If you’re an HR Manager who has fallen out of love with your profession, for example, there are thousands of similar folks who have gone before you and who have left a digital trail for AI to follow. Or if you’re an accountant, fed up with the grueling demands of tax season, you’ll find yourself in the company of tens of thousands of others who have had a similar realization and decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere. For almost every career path out there, in other words, there’s a “path of least resistance” in terms of a short list of jobs that most relate to the set of transferable skills you’ve accumulated to date.
The majority of teachers making a career switch, for example, go on to become educational consultants, non-profit program managers, and corporate trainers. Just as many former attorneys go on to become risk managers and compliance offers — and many former software engineers decide to try their hand at product management, business analysis, or STEM teaching. Again, while there are exceptions to every rule, the reality of supply-and-demand tends to limit the career changing options for people far more than you’d think, particularly if an individual isn’t willing or able to take a major pay cut or start a new career completely from the ground up.
Heck, even my best friend is a perfect illustration of this dynamic in action. As a TV reporter for 30 years, he recently let me know that he’d decided to take job in a new field and in hindsight, before he even opened his mouth to tell me what the new job was, I wish I’d bet him $100 that I could guess! I would have made some easy money, since there’s one clear career path out of all the rest that most values a person who understands how the media world works, how to get a news director’s attention, and how to “spin” a topic in the most positive fashion. It’s the field of public relations. So when my friend told me he’d be taking on a new role as the Public Information Officer for a government agency in Colorado, I wasn’t the least surprised. While certainly not the only direction he could have chosen, it was in many respects the most likely and practical route he could take given the specific nature of the three decades of skills he’d acquired.
So in closing, without question, there are still plenty of dynamics related to making a successful career change (e.g. confidence-building, networking, resume fine-tuning, lifestyle tradeoff decisions, etc.) that can’t yet be fully replicated by robotic means. But in terms of coughing up a quick and impressive list of career choices worthy of consideration? As stated above, ChatGPT and its ilk are much better than you might think — and a great place to start, if you’re considering a switch!
