How AI is helping job seekers pivot to new careers

Mint

01-05-2025

Finding the job hunt challenging? AI might give you some ideas for pivoting to a completely different field.
Career change isn't easy even in strong hiring markets. Candidates need to convince companies that their accomplishments in one field can apply to another—and that betting on someone without exact experience in a role will pay off.
Increasingly, artificial-intelligence tools created by companies including Salesforce, Google and LinkedIn are helping workers sell their skills, tailor their résumés to new areas and identify under-the-radar roles. Other job hunters are using AI prompts to turn widely available chatbots into career coaches.
Brooke Grant had been wanting a new role inside Salesforce when she heard of the company's new AI tool, Career Connect. It analyzes employees' skills and recommends roles internally that they might not have otherwise considered—as well as training programs to help them qualify for those positions.
Grant, who studied communications and organizational psychology, had worked for a decade in a position called change management, helping colleagues adapt to new operational processes. She uploaded her résumé into Career Connect, and the AI tool visualized different paths forward.
One was her own manager's role, showing her what the natural progression would be. One was a role in AI strategy, drawing from her experience with AI at a former company. And one was a 'sales enablement" job—making sure teams have the right tools to close deals and coaching them on techniques and the product. The AI tool identified her overlapping skills for this job. Though she had no sales experience, she contacted the hiring manager, while asking AI for guidance on how to pitch herself.
A new online AI tool at Salesforce, Career Connect, analyzes employees' skills to recommend roles internally.
'I would have never ever even applied for this role if that didn't give me the confidence," she says. She got the job and started in March with a slight raise.
AI tools are opening up potential new jobs that workers might not have otherwise considered, companies say. In some cases, the technology uses natural-language processing to understand what users want and compare it with potential opportunities.
Google and LinkedIn have created products for external users. LinkedIn is releasing to premium subscribers a tool called Next Role Explorer, allowing them to look at jobs inside and outside their current companies as well as online-learning classes to help them land those jobs.
At Google, Career Dreamer uses AI and labor-market data to serve up career possibilities to potential job-switchers. The company released the tool after searches for 'how to change jobs" hit a record level last year.
Google's Career Dreamer uses AI to come up with career recommendations for potential job-switchers.
Google says the free tool has had hundreds of thousands of U.S. users since it launched in February. (It directs users to Google Career Certificates, some of which cost a fee to enroll unless students do so through a school or other partner.) The tool doesn't save users' entries on their servers, only in web browsers, but uses Google Analytics to track overall activity on the program, the company says.
For a user who said she was an accountant at a Big Four firm and noted skills in problem solving, auditing and financial reporting, Career Dreamer advised considering roles as a management consultant or regulatory-affairs specialist. The program suggested a middle-school teacher consider working as a corporate trainer. A link to Google's Gemini AI explained both roles 'require the ability to engage an audience, explain concepts clearly, manage group dynamics, and adapt to different learning styles."
'Most people either aren't conscious of the skills they have from the jobs they've done, or they don't know how to talk about it," says Lisa Gevelber, founder of Grow with Google, an education initiative that launched the Career Dreamer program.
At this moment employers often prefer turnkey candidates vetted by their experience, campus career officers and recruiters say. 'In a hiring-hesitant market, you're going to go with the least risky candidate," says Stephanie Ranno, a former senior vice president of growth for TorchLight Hire, a recruiting and staffing firm. Companies looking to hire might have 200 to 500 candidates and will rank them using applicant-tracking systems that parse résumés for the most relevant experience.
Ranno says she has held free career calls with job seekers whose fields aren't hiring right now—including former federal workers—and recommends that they use AI as an early step. They can upload their résumés to free AI tools like ChatGPT, with a detailed prompt with what they are looking for and their current hiring landscape, she says. Then, they can ask the program for a list of businesses, family foundations or nonprofits that value their experience or have hired people with those skills.
'You can get all of these ideas; you can get excited," Ranno says.
Many early-career professionals enroll in M.B.A. programs to pivot into a new field. Harvard Business School this semester tested an AI tool for students and alumni that compares job seekers' résumés with their preferred roles and recommends online classes to bridge skills gaps. Using natural-language processing, it also shows users job opportunities that could work for them, as well as alumni who work there to contact.
Rachel Fogleman, who is in the M.B.A. program at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University-Indianapolis, tried using AI for career input on her field of public health—one where many need to pivot following funding and program cuts. She spent about 10 hours over several days drafting and redrafting ChatGPT prompts that job seekers in the sector could use.
'You're still telling the same story of who you are but telling it in a way that someone in the private sector understands," she says.
She put the prompts that got the best results on her LinkedIn page. Her first: 'You are a career coach assisting a recently laid-off who is pivoting from governmental public health employment to a private-sector job. Create a list of equivalent private-sector job titles." Users should ask the technology, she wrote, for three potential directly equivalent roles, three potential adjacent roles and three broader private-sector roles with transferable skills, as well as multiple companies hiring for each job title and a specified location.
Fogleman says she doesn't expect ChatGPT to replace an actual career coach, but it is helpful in translating specialized skills to other industries—especially for people who can't afford a professional. For a public-health educator, like herself, AI suggested looking into corporate posts such as employee-wellness program coordinator and community-relations manager.
Write to Lindsay Ellis at [e-mail]