Use ChatGPT to make a career development plan, with prompts

Your responsibility to your team as an HR professional is to invest in your team members as much as they invest in your company.

As an HR professional, you have a gift – and a responsibility – to support your fellow team members to achieve their own ambitions and goals and grow professionally.

Personalized career planning and skill development plans help your team members grow their knowledge and skills which they can then put back into your team. For their part, personalized career planning helps them see a future at your company.

ChatGPT’s personalized responses and real-time feedback make it a very helpful tool when making personalized career development plans. ChatGPT can’t replace you as a career coach, but it can help you make a list of action items for career development. It’s one of the many ways ChatGPT for HR is so useful.

This tutorial will show you how to use ChatGPT to make career development plans, and what ChatGPT career prompts to use.

1. Career path exploration

Note: The ChatGPT career prompts will make use of the PocketHR custom GPT, denoted by “@PocketHR” in any prompts where applicable. To learn how to use custom GPTs, read the OpenAI documentation here.

ChatGPT can help you find potential career paths for your team members that align with their skills, interests, and professional goals. Once they have an action plan and set milestones to achieve it, they can bring their newfound knowledge and add that back to your team.

Putting time and energy into helping your team members explore career paths also helps with employee retention. Employees who get opportunities for career development have 34% higher retention and are 15% more engaged with their work.

Skill and interest assessment

If an employee wants to broaden their skill set or explore a potential role or transition, you can use ChatGPT to help them find a way to explore the area they’re interested in.

Let’s say you have a team member who is a digital marketing specialist, and they’re curious about transitioning to data analytics.

You can use a ChatGPT career prompt like:

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR Identify key skills and interests for a professional specializing in digital marketing with an interest in data analytics.

This is useful for finding overlap between the team member’s current skill set and the area of interest they want to explore, to make a skill set development path that fits their unique profile.

You can then take that information, and build on it to make a timeline for the team member to learn skills in their chosen area of interest.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR Give me a timeline for learning the skills this professional needs to transition to data analytics, with goals and milestones. Include recommendations for courses and certifications.

Role identification and career mapping

You can use ChatGPT to find specific roles that fit the team member’s career goals and aspirations based on their existing skills and industry trends and narrow down the ones that are the best fit for their career development.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR List potential roles for an HR professional interested in incorporating technology into employee engagement strategies.

From there, you can build off the role the team member is most interested in, and make a career plan to transition to their desired role.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR Create a career map for transitioning from their current role to {{desired role}}. Include skill development, experience accumulation, timelines, and any necessary certifications or qualifications.

For this example, we’ll go with role 2: Employee Experience Manager

Industry trends analysis

What if the team member wants to prepare themselves for an emerging role in a new or growing industry?

ChatGPT can help your team members future-proof their careers. With the right prompt, ChatGPT can act as a career coach and anticipate the skills they should learn to pivot and adjust to changing industry trends for their next career move.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR What are the current trends in AI and machine learning for professionals in software development?

ChatGPT is great at predicting possible outcomes and simulating hypothetical scenarios. You can use that to help your team members stay relevant and move into roles where demand is growing.

2. Skill gap analysis

With ChatGPT, you can find the specific areas where a team member needs development or training for promotion to a more senior role within the same team or department.

For example, if a mid-level marketing coordinator wants to be considered for a senior manager role, you can ask ChatGPT:

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR Compare the skills required for a senior marketing manager role to those of a mid-level marketing coordinator.

If something among those skills catches your team member’s interest, you can then have ChatGPT make a plan to learn that required skill and position themselves for the promotion. Let’s do Budget Management, as an example.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR Make a skill development plan for the mid-level marketing coordinator to learn Budget Management.

What if the team member wants to transition into another department altogether? ChatGPT can give you a list of actions for career development to guide the transition.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR What are the key skills needed for transitioning from a customer service role to a sales position?

Learning and development recommendations

If you’ve already had discussions with your team members about what roles and paths interest them and what skills they need to break into them, ChatGPT can then recommend resources and learning paths for them to learn what they need to.

In this example, a data analyst wants to learn Python but doesn’t know where to get started. You can recommend courses and online platforms to give them a nudge in the right direction.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR Recommend online platforms offering advanced Python programming courses suitable for data analysis.

You can also create a structured learning plan for the team member to learn what they need to learn, and have milestones to complete those courses and apply the skills they learned in their current role.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR Design a 6-month learning plan for learning advanced Python skills, including timelines and milestones, and which courses to complete and when.

Remember to make the plan realistic and take into account the team member’s current workload to prevent them from getting overburdened.

Learning and development go beyond individual skill training. Your team member will likely need mentorship to help guide them on their chosen path. You can use ChatGPT to make that a part of your plan.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR How can I integrate mentorship into this learning plan for learning Python as a data analyst?

Then, use ChatGPT’s recommendations to help find the perfect mentor from within your organization. Organize periodic meetups and discussions for the team member to get a chance to talk to people who have made the same career change they’re doing.

3. Resume and LinkedIn profile optimization

Even after your team member gets all the skills, certifications, and coaching they need to take the next steps in their career, they’ll still need to present those somehow.

A well-crafted resume and a polished, updated LinkedIn profile are how they do that. ChatGPT can give you some pointers on what to include and what to say on your team member’s resume and profile to help them on their way.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR What are some best practices for updating a LinkedIn profile for career advancement in software engineering?

You can take it a step further and identify which sections to expand on and what language to include, like what skills and experiences to highlight.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR What should I include in {{skill 1}} and {{skill 2}} to attract opportunities in advanced software engineering? Highlight skills and qualifications I need to include.

We’ll go with 4 and 5 for this example.

4. Interview preparation

The time has come, your team members have spent months preparing, upskilling, and getting guidance from mentors and peers, and now they have everything they need to excel in their desired roles.

The last remaining obstacle in their way is to ace the interview for their transition or internal promotion. You can help them overcome their imposter syndrome and tell a story about their work history that sells them.

There are ways you can help them with that, with ChatGPT’s guidance.

In this example, you’re helping a software engineer at your company transition to a cybersecurity specialist role. You can help prepare a mock interview to help them answer any questions that come their way with confidence.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: @PocketHR Simulate a mock interview for a software engineer transitioning to a cybersecurity specialist.

After you have the basic structure down, you can then prepare for the questions that might come up in each part of the interview, and how to prepare a response based on your team member’s background.

ChatGPT Career Prompt: What are some common questions that someone might get in this interview, and how could a software engineer prepare for them?

Use ChatGPT to give your team members the best chance to succeed

Helping other people reach their hopes and dreams and watching them grow to be the best professional version of themselves is one of the greatest things about working in HR.

ChatGPT can’t replace a human career coach, but it can help you at every step of making a career development plan, from identifying any skills gaps, right down to the interview where you succeed in helping them land their dream role.

To learn more about how ChatGPT can improve your processes and make life easier for you as an HR professional, check out our ChatGPT tutorials here.