How to use AI to support your career development

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi, I'm Helen. Sarah Ellis: And I'm Sarah. Helen Tupper: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly podcast where we talk about the ins, outs, ups and downs of work and share some ideas for action, some tools for you to try out, to give you a little bit more confidence and control over your career development.  And this week, we are diving into the world of artificial intelligence. Sarah Ellis: I can't believe that we are, to be honest! Helen Tupper: I can't believe I've got you to do it! Sarah Ellis: Maybe AI could be recording this! Helen Tupper: I don't know.  Maybe it's not you, maybe it's not me.  No, I feel like it might be slicker if it was AI than us! Sarah Ellis: So much slicker! Helen Tupper: So much slicker than what might be coming!  Yeah, I'm quite surprised that I've persuaded you to do this, and then you've gone off and discovered loads of other stuff.  I'm very impressed with your commitment to the podcast this week. Sarah Ellis: Well, you know, open mindset and all that! Helen Tupper: So, we'll tell you a little bit more about what we have done and learnt and how it will help you with your development in a minute, but Sarah, I know that you have some good news for our listeners. Sarah Ellis: I do indeed.  So, Squiggly Career book.  We have turned The Squiggly Career into a video book.  I say we; we didn't do any of the production, which is why it looks incredible and has interesting animations, it has us on screen doing drawings, it has loads of Squiggly Career stories.  And if you've not come across a video book before, it really does what it says on the tin.  It's about 50 minutes long, it's all broken down into videos for each of the chapters.  You get to download all of the exercises and the workbook. We think it's a really interesting and inclusive way of learning, because it's really visual.  You can break it down, it feels really bitesize.  You can actually download it and also watch it offline, which I think is quite helpful for people's commute and things like that.  And very handily, for four weeks, everybody who listens to the podcast can get a free copy of The Squiggly Career video book.  So, if you want to try it out basically and just see whether it's helpful for you, you can get The Squiggly Career, and then obviously if you want to look at other ones, you can do that. So, how to get your free video book of The Squiggly Career.  You need to go to litvideobooks.com/the-squiggly-career.  Of course, we will put that URL in the show notes and we'll share it when we share this podcast episode.  And then basically, you click to buy, you go to your cart to do your checkout and you create an account.  And then your code, all capitals, is SQUIGGLYCAREERSPODCAST.  So, I know that's always a bit tricky to listen to and jot that down, so maybe this is the one time where you think, "I will look at the show notes for the first time ever", because I know that's not something that I do in a podcast very often.  Or, you can always email us, helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com, if you get a bit lost and you can't find it. You can use the video book on either website or mobile with the same login, so hopefully it will feel helpful.  I hope that feels like a useful thing for our listeners, and we would love some feedback.  So, if you do get your free copy, if you've had a chance to watch it, we'd love to know your reflections, what works well about it, any "even better ifs", whether you think it's something you would use again in the future.  So hopefully, a good little extra Squiggly bonus to start this week's episode. Helen Tupper: What a Squiggly bonus; free learning in exchange for feedback!  So, let's talk about artificial intelligence.  So, it is a topic getting loads of attention and to be honest, I've heard people talking about it and I've almost been thinking, "Do you know what, I need to look into that a little bit more".  It's been on my learning list for a while like, "Oh my gosh, is ChapGPT going to replace career coaching?  What does this mean for the future of our business?  I should probably look into this", but it sort of felt, I don't know, very noisy on lots of social media websites, and I wasn't really sure where to start with it.  But I thought it's worth experimenting with. So, the reason we're covering this is because we do think there is some potential value in some of the tools that are driven by artificial intelligence that could help you with your development, but we wanted to road-test it for you first.  So, we wanted to take lots of different, I call it use cases, and Sarah's like, "That sounds way too technical"; lots of different things that you might do in your day-to-day basically, the normal stuff that you would do, and then take all these tools that everyone's talking about and work out, are they actually useful; is it a lot of noise, or is it helpful? If it is helpful, then maybe we should bring these into our work, into the way our teams work and just get a bit more comfortable with them.  And if it isn't helpful, maybe we should just do what we do really well as humans and stop getting distracted by all the headlines.  So, we are your guineapigs, we have road-tested these things for you, and we're going to be as practical as possible about what we think about them. Sarah Ellis: I really remember a few years ago hearing the Chief Creative Officer of Facebook, and they were called Facebook at that time, talking about the importance of play, and how when you play with tech, you really get a feel for what it does and how it works.  So, as much as I think you can read about AI, and I've done a bit of reading and I've read a few articles and seen people share different points of view and perspectives on the ethics of AI, or how it can work alongside us, rather than against us, or how it can make our lives easier, I do think it's only when you have a go that you just get a real idea for the stage that that technology is at, how it might help, whether it doesn't work for you. So, I think that is almost the main message that I'd encourage everybody to have a think about when you're listening, almost in a very no-pressure sort of way, can you have a play, a bit like Helen and I have done; and honestly, the more I've played with everything, the more fun I've had, because I've not felt like, "I must be doing this, because I feel like it's going to replace me tomorrow"; I've felt more, "How can it help me?" starting off with an optimistic mindset of thinking, "Hopefully there's some good stuff to be learnt along the way".  That has definitely been true, certainly for somebody who's not as into tech as Helen is.  But I think, if I've enjoyed it, I reckon everybody else can too. Helen Tupper: So, what we'll do is we'll go through the situations when we think you can use this stuff and we'll talk about the tools that we tried out, and then we will summarise it all for you.  So, in the PodSheet, which you can get from our website, amazingif.com, you'll find all of the links there.  And then, if you follow us on social media, @amazingif on Instagram, or @amazingif, our LinkedIn page, we'll do a PodNote there so that you'll be able to download it and you'll be able to try out these tools and find them really easily.  But yeah, it's more about having a play, having a go, experimenting and just enjoying it and seeing what happens.  I think that's what Sarah and I have done. Also, Sarah and I haven't really talked about this, so I don't know what she thinks of the tools that she's tried out, so I am listening and learning at the same time as you.  So, Sarah, the first thing that you did was used AI to help you write a CV. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, so I used something called Kickresume, and we've done a "what worked well; even better if", obviously, for each of the AI tools.  Who knew the AI could probably do the "what worked well; even better if" for you of their own tool, which gets a bit meta if you think about it like that!  But what I really liked about Kickresume, and generally when I've looked at CVs, there are now so many examples to borrow brilliance from.  I actually think there's no excuse to not have a decent CV now, because there are expert guides that you can read on Kickresume, so it does give you content.  I think that content is written by humans; I think it is because they describe the experts.  I don't think they're made-up experts.  I was like, "What's real and what's not?"  But I think the expert guides are written, there's loads of examples, there's loads of templates. Then what you can do, which I did try, is you can turn your LinkedIn into your CV, and they show you step-by-step how to do it.  I followed those steps and I could do it.  Who knew you can download all of your data from LinkedIn, but you can!  So, I sort of have this file on my computer now with all of my LinkedIn.  You literally pop it into Kickresume, you choose the template that you want, so obviously I loved doing that, I loved picking, I was like, "Which one do I want?"  I was looking at the design, obviously I quite like looking at the design stuff.  And then it sort of puts everything in there for you. Now, is it 100% right; is it a CV I would ever send to anyone?  Of course not, because it basically can only take and scrape the data that's there.  So, would I want to personalise it?  Yes.  Are there some things you'd change?  Of course.  But it does do, I reckon, 60% to 70% of the hard work for you, if your LinkedIn is up to date, because obviously it's put in all the dates, it's put in all the roles, it gives you so many suggestions of, "You could do it a bit like this [or] here's how to write a really good cover letter, here's how to write a really good summary". The majority of what I found on Kickresume and on other places is free.  Most of the time, there are some free things that you can access.  And then usually, at some point, you hit a paywall, because I assume at some point they have to make some money.  So, paywalls might be, if you wanted ten different templates, or if you wanted lots of examples of cover letters.  The only thing I would say I found when I was particularly looking at CVs and cover letters, because I guess they're an obvious application for AI, is it almost becomes overwhelming.  I was like, "Wow, there are 100 different options for what my CV should look like", some which you can quickly discount, but I was like, "How do I know if that one's better than another one? They do go quite far.  On the CV templates, they put logos and they'll say, "A CV in this format, this person was hired by Adidas", and they name the brands and basically they're saying, "This has worked".  It's sort of a stamp of approval, which I was like, "Oh, that's quite interesting".  So, I think my conclusion on the CV and cover letter stuff was, it's a great place to start if you're feeling a bit stuck.  I think it would challenge you to maybe consider doing a CV in a slightly different way, or maybe including some things like skills or capabilities in different ways.  I definitely saw stuff that I thought, "I'd borrow that idea".  Do you still need to do some of the heavy lifting to really make sure it reflects you and it tonally feels right for you?  Yes, but I still felt like there was lots of useful stuff to be had. Helen Tupper: And you know you said you connected it to your LinkedIn and then it got you sort of 60%, 70% there with a CV that you would then need to personalise; how long did that process take, from logging on, connecting with LinkedIn? Sarah Ellis: So, there was a three-step process, which I did the first two steps, and then you have to wait 24 hours to get the download from LinkedIn, so you couldn't do it all on the same day.  So, I did it yesterday, I got the files today from LinkedIn, they both came through; that was really easy.  You literally drag and drop them into Kickresume.  The CV appears then straightaway in the template.  If you wanted it that day, you wouldn't be able to do it, but within two days you can. Helen Tupper: Interesting.  Okay, so imagine you've got this amazing CV that you have got from Kickresume, and then you've improved it yourself with your very human skills, then you get an interview.  So, the next bit of AI we need is to help us prepare for an interview, and I used interviewschool.com.  So, I went onto the website, I did it before the paywall, so there is a paywall thing where you get loads of different interviews that you can take.  I just went with one that was available for everybody. So, Sarah, I interviewed for a sales executive at Verizon, and I sat there at my kitchen table, and this AI man interviewed me for the job.  And honestly, it was so real that my little boy, Henry, came up to me and was like, "Mummy, is this live?" and I was like, "No, but get out, I'm being interviewed by AI.  Get out of the screen!" Sarah Ellis: "Don't interrupt me, I want to pass this interview, I want to win"! Helen Tupper: Well, do you know, it got a little bit like that.  So, this man, this AI, was asking me a series of questions that would give me practice in terms of answering for this job as a sales executive, and I actually felt a little bit under pressure. Sarah Ellis: That's probably a good thing though, right? Helen Tupper: Yeah, and they were actually quite good questions.  But he'd say like, "Talk about a time when you've negotiated for something that you wanted at work", and then you answer it.  And whilst you are answering it, he's nodding and moving his head in quite a realistic way! Sarah Ellis: So weird! Helen Tupper: It's so weird!  And then you do your answer and then you press "next question" and then he comes at you with the next question.  It does feel a little bit like he's coming at you with the next question, because if you were interviewing me, there would be a bit of rapport. Sarah Ellis: Okay, yeah. Helen Tupper: So, I might ask you a question, you might ask a follow-up question on what I've said, so there's a natural flow that maybe creates connection in an interview; whereas, this was like an interrogation for a sales job, a little bit!  But equally, he asked me about six or seven questions, they were good questions, they made me think about my answers, and then you got feedback on the clarity of your answers, on keywords, on your pace, all those sorts of things. So actually, I think it is quite good preparation for you to feel a little bit more confident.  It's sort of like a role-play that no one else sees, and I would have come up with more ideas as a result of doing that, than if I'd just turned up at the interview with a real person. Sarah Ellis: Gone, straight for interview. Helen Tupper: Yeah.  So, I think it was good.  Like I say, I just did one of the ones that were available, and I think if you pay, you get access to more specific jobs, more specific prep.  But I think it's worth it.  I would recommend Interview School if you've got an interview coming up, to practise your skills, feel confident in your answers. Sarah Ellis: Anything that you didn't like, or that didn't quite work for you? Helen Tupper: It's supposed to generate a report for me and that took quite a long time.  It said it was going to take it in 15 minutes and it took a long time, and so I thought, you know some of it's not quite there yet.  The idea and opportunity is pretty impressive, but some of the tech's not quite there yet, still a little bit glitchy.  So, that was probably an "even better if" on that platform, but I think it's very, very nearly there. No, I think just I wouldn't want to think -- do you know what, it made me think two things actually.  It made me think, "Gosh, actually interviews are nicer".  So, I wouldn't want someone to think that was what an interview was going to be like, that you have to be interrogated, because I think it is important that you ask questions back, and it is important that there's rapport, and you get none of that.  And then the other thing that it made me think was, what if companies start doing this as the first round? Sarah Ellis: That's what I was just thinking. Helen Tupper: Yeah. Sarah Ellis: When they've got to do filtering, surely companies are going to start using it. Helen Tupper: And you and me, I think we would come up with ideas and it would be the bouncing between people that would probably help us to be our best.  So it made me think, "If companies are going to use this as first-round screening, I feel like that could screen out people that might be really good, because that's just not a particularly comfortable way of communicating for some people".  So, that's my only little, "I'm not 100% sure about it". Sarah Ellis: Red flag? Helen Tupper: Yeah, a little bit. Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  And I think back to you point about usability, I found a real difference with everything I tested.  I got very annoyed if it's too hard to test.  So, I think with all of them, you know when it's easy to access and easy to have a go at, if they've basically removed barriers to entry, they're all the ones that I got most involved in, started playing with loads more.  When they were making you sign up, and I'm sure it's because they all want your data, but there were loads of hoops to go through, I just lost interest, or I was like, "You're making this too hard for me to even test out". I think with a lot of them, because they are at quite early stages, the ones that are really smart are just making it really easy to test and just have some fun with. Helen Tupper: Okay, so we've written our CV, we've done our interview, we've got the job, we're now in the day-to-day of our work and we are probably in back-to-back meetings, we're doing presentations, we're doing Teams calls, we're doing Zoom calls, so how can AI help us now?  Well, it can help you to improve your communications in the meetings.  There is one tool that I paid for, and it is poised.com, because I was so intrigued about how could this help me improve my presenting skills, my communications, and it's really good, it's really, really good!  This is one of my favourites. Sarah Ellis: You got so enthusiastic about this, I was like, "She absolutely loves whatever this is!" Helen Tupper: I'm not sure you're going to love this. Sarah Ellis: Tell us more. Helen Tupper: Okay.  So you go on poised.com and I think I paid £15 and I'll turn it off soon, because I just did it for the benefit of our listeners, and what it does is you connect it to your Microsoft Teams and your Zoom account.  That was pretty simple, didn't take me long to do that.  And then it sits in the background of your meetings. Sarah Ellis: Oh my God, no! Helen Tupper: I know you're not going to like this; wait!  So, it sits in the background of your meetings, and every one of your meetings, it's recording just you, not the other people, just you.  And what it does, it does two things.  So, real time, you get feedback on your pitch, your pace, your filler words, your domination of the discussion; real time, you can see this all flashing up.  And then afterwards, what it does is it saves all the insights on a dashboard, and it gives it a score.  So, you can see overall what was your communication score. Sarah Ellis: I'm looking at yours now, because you've given me a diagram to look at. Helen Tupper: I know, and then you get loads of feedback on your confidence and clarity and all this kind of stuff.  Mine's a little bit misleading, I think, because a lot of what we do on Zoom is we're presenting Squiggly sessions, so it's slightly misleading, but I could just delete those Squiggly sessions and look at it more as actual conversations in meetings, and that will probably give me fairer.  But unsurprisingly, Sarah, I score quite highly on the energy and my communications, and quite badly on my pace, because most of my feedback is that I should slow down a little bit, which is not new news to you, real friend, not AI friend!  So, yeah, I would really recommend it.  What do you think? Sarah Ellis: Yeah, that's interesting.  I mean, I really don't agree with in-the-moment feedback, because that's so counter to -- I mean, today, I was talking to a group about the importance of being present and distraction downfalls and how the quality of our attention equals the quality of our thinking.  So, if you suddenly are giving real-time pop-up feedback that is distracting you from a conversation, especially if you are already somebody who is quite easily distracted, and I often ask people, "How often are you interrupted in a day?" essentially what that's doing is interrupting you.  So, I am very anti that in terms of focus. Helen Tupper: But you can turn it off. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, if you can turn it off; great. Helen Tupper: Every time, I have also found that distracting, but I'm just looking at it now, I think it's actually recording me now, hilariously! Sarah Ellis: Oh, great, I'm getting recorded and I don't even know; this is exactly why we need ethics! Helen Tupper: It doesn't record you, it just records me.  But it says here, I did a session earlier and it says, "You could have sounded more confident by intentionally pausing to breathe.  It helps you to feel in control of your message". Sarah Ellis: Breathe Helen, Goddamn it, breathe! Helen Tupper: Breathe!  Then it has a little statement that I said, and then you can play back, it records just that little clip.  So, the advice it gives you, it just snips that little bit so you can play it back and listen to it. Sarah Ellis: I do think that is useful. Helen Tupper: It is really, really smart and I do think it's useful as well.  I think I would recommend this to people. Sarah Ellis: I feel like I might have a go at that one, turn off automatically straightaway the live feedback thing because I don't agree with that.  I don't understand how that could ever be useful for the way that our brains work and what we know about our brains.  But I do think sometimes, I've got some hypotheses about some things that I think I do, but it would be really great to get feedback on those things that I think are unhelpful. So, you know you were saying, "Maybe I do know about pace, but maybe it's really reinforced that"?  I think I'm not as good when I'm meeting someone for the first time, because I think I get nervous and I think I interrupt too much and I think I dominate some conversations more than I would like to.  So maybe just having data for your development, we talk about having data, it gives you some really specific data for your development and then presumably, you could then look at it over time and see if you're getting any better. Helen Tupper: Yeah, because you get a score. Sarah Ellis: That bit, I like. Helen Tupper: You'd see your scores improving.  The "filler words" is really useful as well.  Mine are often "so", and this doesn't always make comfortable reading, but actually it is good for your development. Sarah Ellis: I'm going to do that one. Helen Tupper: Yeah! Sarah Ellis: I like 50% of it and not the other 50%.  So now, with the help of AI, you have your dream job, you're smashing that dream job, and you're thinking about, "Where shall I go next; how do I explore my career possibilities?"  So, for career possibilities and thinking about where your career could take you, I used a tool called wouldyouratherbe.com, and this really encourages you to explore the art of the possible.  So, it kind of makes you go through a careers quiz asking you loads of questions about yourself, but also about lots of different kinds of jobs, and it is like, "Would you rather?" So it's like, "Would you rather be a beautician or an engineer?" and then it gives you a short paragraph about what those jobs involve.  So, you do get a bit of a feel for, "I don't know what it looks like to be an engineer", but it will describe the sorts of things you might do, spending your time doing those roles.  And it definitely broadens your thinking about all the different types of jobs that are out there. I would say, of everything I tried, it was the one that I enjoyed the least, because it was a lot of just clicking through.  So it was like, "Would you rather…?" millions of these questions, "Career advisor?" and I was like, "Maybe that one", "Or sports star?"  I was like, "Well, if you're giving me sports star; maybe!"  So, they're quite dramatically different and they try and motivate you to keep going, because they obviously need more data, I guess, to try and then be useful.  And then they categorise them into, "You would like creator jobs", for example, and then they give you lots of ideas for, "Okay, if you want to do creator jobs, here are loads of examples of what that could look like". It was reminiscent for me of really career advice that you do at school, but maybe slightly more sophisticated, and I wasn't then sure what I would then do with it.  I think if I'd maybe never had a job before, you know if you're really starting from scratch, maybe it would help you.  But I did have to fill in a lot of stuff about me at the start that was all on LinkedIn, and I'd actually thought I hadn't even done the other tool yet and I was like, "Surely, this could just -- does it not just know this?"  By this point, I'm expecting all AI to be super-smart and just know this! I was a bit worried some of it felt not as inclusive as it could be, because I did get asked quite a lot of questions about things like my qualifications, and I was like, "Surely we want to give people options and opportunities that are not just based on their education level?"  So, I struggled a bit with how I'd find this useful, the "so what" of this.  I would almost like to hear from somebody perhaps who maybe if you were at school and you're not even thinking about your career when you're 16, 17, 18, unless you're very vocationally focused, I guess; but maybe at that point, I could imagine it might be a bit more useful, because it does just show you all of the different things, it means you don't limit yourself too soon; there were lots of different styles and roles. But I wasn't sure about this one.  It might just be that I've not seen the potential and you do have the same thing of, "Am I using this in the right way?"  But it didn't work for me and I couldn't think of anyone who I would then almost recommend it for. Helen Tupper: It doesn't sound as useful as a more retro curious career conversation.  Like, I'm going to have a couple of curious career conversations and I'm going to find out how you got to where you've got to and what you did and what you've learnt, and think about whether that could be a good fit for me in my future.  I feel like I would get more value having a couple of curious career conversations in quite an analogue way, than using this AI Would You Rather Be solution. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and it really did tell me things I already knew.  So it did say, "You'd probably quite like jobs where you get to create", and I just think a lot of people would already know that.  And then it was giving me these very wide range of roles, but maybe not the support with how to get there, or what then I might do.  And most people are coming from, they're doing something today and I was like, "Now I'm being told I need to go and do set design".  I'm like, "Okay, that feels quite far from where I am right now". But again, maybe we're not the audience.  So, maybe if you're listening and you're at the start of your career, have a go and see if you have a different experience; or, if you know someone who's at the start, perhaps share it with them and let us know whether they found it useful. Helen Tupper: One tool that I used to explore career possibilities as well, thinking about what I might want to do in the future, is I used Google Bard, which I think is actually quite like ChapGPT.  I think you have to join a wait list, but then you immediately get an email that goes, "And now you're on the list"! Sarah Ellis: It's just a really short wait! Helen Tupper: I don't know whether they're trying to play with some psychology of, "Oh, I've been accepted into a club!" I don't know, but basically you go onto Google Bard, you join the wait list and then within about two minutes, you're in the group.  And I asked it, I thought, "Do you know what, I'll imagine I want to work at Microsoft", like one of my career possibilities is to work at Microsoft, and I thought I will ask it about what it's like to work in marketing at Microsoft in the UK, what the company culture's like, what the pros and cons are of working for Microsoft.  And I thought, do you know what, I will compare what it says with my actual experience of working in that organisation. Sarah Ellis: Interesting. Helen Tupper: It was pretty accurate!  Because, Microsoft's quite nuanced in that you have what I would think of as big Microsoft in Seattle, and then you have the countries, which are kind of the sales engines for the businesses.  And the culture, I would say, in the countries is quite different to the centre of the business, and it picked up on those nuances, I don't know how, but it picked up on those nuances about the difference of working in country roles versus in central company roles.  The pros and cons were very reflective of my experience. So, I actually thought, if you had a wishlist of five companies you wanted to work in and you were trying to work out what could culturally be a good fit and what might working there look like, I think using a tool like Google Bard, ChatGPT probably does the same thing, definitely time well spent. Sarah Ellis: I got asked that very question today.  So, after a workshop, someone came up to me and said, "If I was trying to get a feel for a culture for a company, anything that you'd recommend?"  Actually I said, "Well, have a look at Glassdoor, because that will give you a bit of a feel.  It can be a bit extreme, but it will give you a bit of a feel.  And I said, "Go and have some curious career conversations, so look for people who have maybe worked there previously, because that's always really interesting because then they've got no vested interested, or who work there now who you think would be prepared to be honest with you about their experiences".  But that would have been a really good build. This is not about just doing one thing; we're not going, "Don't have conversations any more".  But if you were like, "I've looked at that Google Bard --" why is it called Bard, by the way? Helen Tupper: Well, isn't bard like a scholar; if you're a bard? Sarah Ellis: I mean, maybe I've learnt something new today, I don't know.  I don't feel like it's a very universal word, is it? Helen Tupper: Wasn't Shakespeare a bard?  We should probably know this!  Shall we go on Google Bard and ask what a bard is?! Sarah Ellis: I just think it's quite a weird word, it's not like it's an everyday word, but anyway. Helen Tupper: Well, ChatGPT is not really catchy, is it? Sarah Ellis: I know, I find that really hard to say, so I think they should rename it.  I'm obsessed with them renaming these things into more useful things that are easy to remember.  But I do think that is really helpful, getting a feel for fit, we always talk about that.  Be really active about exploring, get a feel for what somewhere's really like, and if it helps you to do that, I can see that being really useful. Helen Tupper: So, next up, we're going to think about, in your average day, how can AI help you to save time.  What's interesting here is I used a tool that I think could be quite useful and Sarah has used the same tool for a different purpose.  So, the tool is Wordtune and, Sarah, what did you use it for? Sarah Ellis: Writing and summarising. Helen Tupper: Okay.  So, wordtune.com is the tool; let me tell you how I used it to save time.  So, I was reading, well, I'd seen a report from the World Economic Forum which I wanted to read, I think it was something you shared on our Teams channel, Sarah, about skills and things, and I looked at it and I was like, "296 pages; that's a beast of a read that I'm not going to be able to do!" and I thought, "I've got to test these tools for the podcast".  And, one of the things that Wordtune does is it summarises PDFs, reports, websites. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I know, I tried that too. Helen Tupper: And so, I just added this 296-page World Economic Forum report and within, I don't know, 30 seconds, maybe less, it had summarised it all for me and I was like, "Wow, that's pretty useful".  Now, when I say summarised, it hadn't done one paragraph, it didn't condense the 296 pages into one paragraph.  What it did is it summarised every page, so I could scroll down it and I could be like, "Okay, page 1, that's the key takeaway; page 2, that's the key takeaway", so I still had to scroll down.  But what I found was quite useful was, I was able to go, "That page 36, that looks like probably the bit that's most relevant for me", and I could go and spend more time reading the pages that were relevant.  It was a good first filter. What I don't think it did was gave me the final answer that I would want to get to.  So, when I'm reading a report, I'm looking and my particular thing that I'm trying to get out of it is key stats and statements that are really sticky.  And I think for me, I was like, "That feels like a Helen human skill", to be able to read that report and go, "That's a sticky stat.  I can write a LinkedIn post on that" or, "That's a good idea, there's a nugget in that that we can use in a podcast in the future".  And so, that curiosity connecting dots thing, it doesn't do that.  It basically collects lots of dots and summarises them for you, but it misses the stuff that makes it really interesting, because I think it almost condenses it in quite a generic way.  Really good for saving time; I do think it was really useful, but I don't think it replaces the need to read and pick out the points that capture interest. Sarah Ellis: So, I absolutely love it.  I am very, very onboard with Wordtune, as it turns out; I'm like, "Oh my God, this is brilliant!".  I do think basically I could tell you so much about it, I've spent so much time on it! Helen Tupper: She's so excited!  I have never seen you so excited about technology. Sarah Ellis: So, you can put in -- I think I'm blown away by how clever some tech is sometimes, I'm like, "Oh my God, it's just so clever!"  So, you can put in a paragraph, for example, and it can rewrite, so it can literally rewrite a sentence, and it gives you lots of options; that's what I really like about it.  It doesn't just go, "Here's a rewrite", it goes, "Here's three rewrites, you choose the one that you like the best".  You can shorten, so you can literally click on a button that says, "Shorten", and it just makes it more condensed and simple; you can expand it; you can use casual or formal tone, I loved playing around with that and obviously I preferred the more casual tone.  And so, I used it on an example. So, very specifically, someone in our team at Amazing If recently asked me to rewrite something for them.  They were like, "I'm struggling a bit to articulate this thing.  Sarah, can you have a go at rewriting it?" and I was like, "Yeah, really happy to do that".  I do that quite a bit for people.  I'm broadly okay at writing; not amazing, but okay.  So then I was like, "Would this be better than me?"  So, I know what I've written, so then I could test myself against it.  By that point, obviously I was getting quite competitive, I was like, "Do I beat the bot?" basically, "Can you beat the bot?" It turns out probably not.  For something like writing, I looked at it and I was like, well, if we had used this as a team, you've got to know your own tone, you've got to know your own style, but I looked at it and I was like, "Yeah, there are two or three here that are pretty good", and you then need to tweak a tiny bit.  But I was thinking, "I think somebody could do that for themselves, then they wouldn't need me", and then I spend time on things that are adding even more value than me rewriting some sentences.  So, as much as you can do it, I was like, "Well, it's just better". I mean, I was making Helen laugh, because I wanted to do it at the start and she wouldn't let me, of the podcast.  I put our podcast intro into it and I was like, "How would you introduce Squiggly Careers podcast?"  I then put what we sometimes say and I put that into it.  I was like, "All of these things are better than what we do!"  Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn has written a book.  I think he's written a book using ChatGPT; I think that's what he used.  It's quite hard to tell sometimes it's not written by a person.  I do think their copy skills, when you're writing simple, straightforward things, do they write creative copy?  I've got to hope still that humans can do that, but I don't know.  I was like, "Is this going to help us write our next book?"  Maybe.  It's better than you think. I would be naturally so anti that, I'd back myself, I'd be like, "Well, no, my writing will always be better, they won't get our tone".  The more I've used it, the more I'm like, "Maybe it should write our next book, maybe we should stop writing books because the AI will just do it for us".  It's really made me question life, this one has!  I was like, "I've got so many questions". Helen Tupper: I mean, I thought this was going to be a podcast about top tips for people to try out tech -- Sarah Ellis: Oh right, yeah, sorry! Helen Tupper: -- but it feels like we've started to question the universe and our role in it as human beings; it's gone quite deep quite quick! Sarah Ellis: Well, when you start to see it be good, actually good, I was like, "Oh, okay, well…" and also, it just doesn't bother me, because I'm not that bothered about being able to -- if that can write a better sentence, what I love is better sentences.  So, if that's what gets to better sentences, then great.  But I still think you probably need the human input, you've got to know what you want to write first.  But for lots of business writing, lots of business writing isn't really creative, we're trying to be short and specific and concise, and that's something lots of people struggle with and this solves that problem. Helen Tupper: It does make you think, doesn't it about, "Well, how do you beat the bot?"  If the bot's going to get better and better, and it's going to get better at writing really, really quickly, it will learn your tone and it will be able to do this really quickly; so then, are you better than the bot because of the questions you ask of the bot?  So, does being able to write really good problem statements and come up with really good questions, is that the skill that you invest in? You could lose confidence pretty quickly with some of these things and go, "Well, what's the point of me writing social media copy when the bot can just do it for us?" but actually I think it's like, don't try to compete with tech that is accelerating very fast, it's a losing game, I think it's a losing game, but think about, "What skills become increasingly relevant when that bit of my skill's been outsourced to another tool?" I used a really similar, just in case people want to try a different one, I used GrammarlyGO, which has exactly what Sarah says.  You can put in a paragraph and it will write things for you.  I got it to write me a LinkedIn post.  It wasn't quite my tone, but it had some of the same functionality that Sarah said, like shorten it, make it more informal, all that kind of stuff, which I quite like seeing.  The thing with GrammarlyGO is, I mean I can see it on my screen, it integrates.  These things, it's a bit like Poised; it integrates into your systems, it's really hard to get rid of it.  So now, every time I type on my Teams or on my emails, I just see the Grammarly pop up all the time and I'm like, "No, go, literally go, Grammarly, but not the GrammarlyGO you're trying to market to me; go, leave me alone!" Sarah Ellis: "Go away!" Helen Tupper: Yeah, "Go away, Grammarly!"  So, I do need to do some deleting of some things that I've downloaded for the sake of this podcast. Sarah Ellis: Oh, yeah, me too.  I think I've subscribed to about 4 million things and then at one point I started to think, "I need to stop using my email address", genuinely, I was like, "This is going to be really annoying".  So, yeah, what we do for our listeners! Helen Tupper: Right, we've got a couple more each, everybody.  Really quick one that I would recommend trying out if you find you quite like watching video content, particularly on YouTube; so, if one of the ways you learn is by watching video content, really good tool called videohighlight.com.  I was really impressed by this.  So, I took a video -- we put all of our weekly PodPlus sessions onto YouTube.  I took a link from YouTube of one of our PodPlus sessions, I pasted it into VideoHighlight, and VideoHighlight instantly transcribed our 30-minute PodPlus session, not only into the exact thing that Sarah had said, because it was Sarah presenting, but it summarised what Sarah had said into headings and bullet points.  I mean, you're quite succinct and useful anyway. Sarah Ellis: Did it make me sound good? Helen Tupper: Better, even better! Sarah Ellis: Brilliant! Helen Tupper: It was bullet points.  It was a headline and then, "Here are five coach-yourself questions", and it summarised them all.  Really useful.  My caveat on this, it didn't work with TED.  So, TED must have some special coding with the TED Talks that sit on YouTube that meant you couldn't do it with that.  But any other YouTube video, and it took, I mean, cut/paste press the button and then 10 seconds later, you've got a transcription.  VideoHighlight.com; well worth a look. Sarah Ellis: And so, the final AI use case that we're going to talk about today is for coaching, and in lots of ways I think this is almost the most obvious place, because we know that we want coaching to be more accessible, more affordable, and this is a great way for this to happen.  So, I used a tool called heypi.com, and it's actually not designed to be a career coach, I don't think, if I've understood it correctly.  I think it's designed more to be like your friend, or more like a person to just chat to.  But I thought I would ask it some career questions just to see what happened, because I was even thinking today actually, when I went out to get a coffee, so often when I'm being nosey and I overhear conversations, I hear people talking to each other about their jobs or about their careers, and often I really want to dive in and say, "Have you listed to episode … of the Squiggly Careers podcast; it might be useful?"  Obviously I don't do that. But I think we do talk to our friends and our families about our jobs and our careers, and so even though I think there's probably a separate episode in coaching/tech and AI and how it might be useful and when it might not be, I actually thought it might be helpful to try something slightly different, rather than a more obvious coaching AI.  And I was actually surprised, I was really impressed with the quality of the questions that the AI can ask you. So, I used an example of saying, and it is an example, Helen, I promise, "Feeling a bit stuck in my career, feeling demotivated, I think I want to do something different".  So, that was my stimulus, my starting point.  And yeah, it was asking me really good, open questions, very good coaching-style questions.  It was empathetic in style, I felt like it really understood me.  I think I could definitely make friends with a robot, I'm so needy.  And it also made some quite decent suggestions. So, the sort of things it started to prompt, I don't feel it was patronising or telling me what to do, but it was saying, "If this is something you really enjoy", I think I put "creativity", you know, "could you carve out a bit more time in your day job for that, or actually does that feel too difficult to do?"  So, I felt like it was like an empathetic friend would, listening to what I said, offering me some options, and then letting me explore and seeing where I went from there. I think the things that didn't work for me is I still didn't feel that it was a substitute for a career conversation, but what it is is immediate and available.  So, if you just wanted to have a play with it and you've got an immediate career question, "How do I ask for a pay rise?  I'm having a really difficult relationship with my manager", you could get some initial thoughts or questions that I think would be quite a good starting point for coaching yourself.  So, almost you might use it to do a bit of thinking to prompt some thinking, you know, does it give you any suggestions or things you've not thought of for yourself, so it furthers your own thinking; and then, I think you could take that into an even more meaningful career conversation. So, I can start to see how AI could make career conversations even better.  They help you to do more of the hard work for yourself, and we know that's important, because then you feel more ownership for your answers and for your actions.  The biggest problem I had with it was that the tone was way too enthusiastic for me.  There's a lot of exclamation marks and, "Awesome!"  I don't know why I feel it sounds like that, but that's what I felt like it sounded like.  So, after a bit, it got a bit grating and I sort of went, "This is not quite for me in its current form". But it is also very clear, which I appreciated.  At the bottom of the page it says, "This is still very much being tested, it makes mistakes, don't necessarily rely on this for advice".  And so, if you were thinking, "Well, is this telling me this is the right answer?" I thought it was very clear that it was like, "Oh, no, it's making some suggestions".  It's giving you some options; it's not trying to tell you what to do, which I do think is a really good thing.  So, like a lot of our other tools, I could really see potential, even if it's not quite there yet. Helen Tupper: So, hopefully you've found that a helpful listen, everybody.  We know we've gone through loads of different tools, so they are all summarised in the PodSheet, which you can get on amazingif.com.  If there are other tools that you have tried out that you think we should know about, please email us, helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.  And when we post this on social media, which will be on @amazingif on Instagram, and on our LinkedIn page there, please comment, share, so that other people can have a play with these things.  Our perspective is just the more we play, the more comfortable we get, and the more we also see how these can help us and how we might need to help ourselves with our very human skills too. So, thank you so much for listening, everybody, and we'll be back again next week.  Bye everyone. Sarah Ellis: Bye for now.