So you can’t use AI at work? That’s rough. But there are no rules about using AI to help you find new work. Admit it. As soon as ChatGPT was released in November 2022, you punched in the query, “Show me job openings for (whatever your field was).” We’ve all been there.
It’s been something of a pipe dream that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any of the generative AI models would be good enough to actually help us in our job searches, rather than spew out the type of unhelpful platitudes that your great aunt would offer unsolicited over the dinner table.
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“Buck up!”
“Know your worth!”
“Go with your strengths!”
ChatGPT and the like were never any good at it, but now Google has unveiled what they call an “early-stage experiment exploring how AI can assist people in discovering career possibilities.” It’s called Career Dreamer, and it runs on their Gemini AI.
what it does (and doesn’t do)
As far as rounding up relevant, fresh, and not totally made-up job listings, Career Dreamer won’t do that. AI is still fairly junky at aggregating job listings from across the web. What it does do is help you make sense of all your disparate job experience.
“Career Dreamer uses AI to find patterns and connect the dots between your unique experiences, educational background, skills and interests. Think of it like a helping hand to bridge where you’ve been and imagine where you could go next,” Google wrote in its blog announcement.
“It helps you to quickly identify your unique skills and talents and how to talk about them, and connects you with careers (based on job market data from Lightcast and the Bureau of Labor Statistics) that might be a good fit. It can even help you discover training resources like Google Career Certificates and Google Cloud Skills Boost.”
You’re feeding a lot of personal, identifiable information into a company that doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to respecting privacy. Despite that, they say that Career Dreamer doesn’t save your work on its servers, and that it’s only saved in your web browser. That said, it also says, “We use Google Analytics to monitor aggregated activity so we can improve the experience for users. For more information, see the Google Terms of Service.”
For now, you have to be in the US to use Career Dreamer. It costs nothing, and as long as you’re OK with the use of Google Analytics, you could turn AI to your advantage, even as it threatens our collective job security. After all, a knife cuts both ways.