AI as your career coach, with Logan Currie

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0:36Today, Raz's success is proof that with passion and the right support, it's possible to make your dreams a reality. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash business cards. We all grow up in an education setting where there's a teacher giving us a rubric and it's like, OK, do these things and you will do well. And so to be in a world without a syllabus is quite frightening in many ways. There isn't one single guide to how to do your life. Logan Curry says this is why crossroad moments can be so challenging. What should you do after your master's or PhD? What should you do when you want a new career challenge?

1:21But you also crave assurance that you're making the right choice. That is ultimately where we all find ourselves at many times in our careers. You know, like, OK, what do I do now? I think that there's so much complexity and nuance and uncertainty that it is a very stressful part about being an adult in the world. But I think that knowing yourself and knowing what you're going after is the key starting point, I would say. What if there was a tool that could help you figure out not only what you're going after, but also what unique skills you have that can help you get there? This is exactly what Logan is trying to do with her company, CareerSpan.

2:03Think of it as a career coach combined with a personal journal, all powered by AI. On this episode, we're talking about AI career companions, how you can use them at any stage of your career, and of course, what this all means for the future of work. I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

2:40Hi, Logan, welcome to the show. Thank you, Rana. Excited to be here. Logan and her co-founder, Virgin Adawar, founded the company around two years ago. But Logan has had a dynamic career leading up to this point. She's traveled and worked all across the world, and she's worked in a variety of different roles, mostly in education and college counseling. And she's currently pursuing a master's of education at Harvard. I wanted to know how career span fits into all of these different experiences.

3:13I'm always curious about that tipping point where you're like, I absolutely have to do this. I'm doing it. Oh, fantastic question. It's quite a roundabout journey, I would say, but it's always really clear in retrospect, which is the beauty of kind of storytelling and careers in general. Right. You never know where things are headed and then you look back on it and you're like, oh, this is the point where something really changed. So, you know, I think in terms of my own journey as kind of an entrepreneur, a lot of it was around risk taking and building resilience. I lived and worked and studied in five countries.

3:44I've learned a language kind of from scratch when I lived in Shanghai. I fell on my face so many times. Like when I first got there, I didn't speak any Chinese. There were no like language apps or anything like that. And trying to navigate like getting on and off a bus was like a total nightmare. And you're like, OK. So being able to be embarrassed, you know, having zero ego is a big part of that journey of just falling on your face, learning, adapting, getting back up and trying again, adapting to different work cultures and styles. And throughout that, I think when I was working with students and young people primarily for a long time, for 15 years now, it's always been around trying to help them.

4:25You were doing college counseling, right? Doing college counseling. Yeah. So I started 15 years ago helping a few students that I was teaching SAT to in Thailand. And that just developed over the years to helping people apply to undergraduate programs all around the world, graduate programs. And then they'd often come back to me, you know, to be like, I'm looking for an internship. I want to try to find a job. And I realized I saw this need for continued support, I would say, because I think that having somebody who knows you, who knows your history, and it's kind of like just a sounding board.

4:56I have students who I literally worked with in 2009 who still contact me and they're like, what do you think I should do? And I'm like, and it's never about me telling them what to do, right? It's always about reflecting back to them. What do you think your options are in your own words? I don't have all the answers. You probably do. And he would come to me when he was applying to his MBA program, when he was doing his McKinsey interviews. He was like, Logan, like, what should I lead with? You know, what's, and I would kind of help him with that. And he would do the same for me when I applied to Harvard.

5:23He was like, lead with this story. And I had completely forgotten about it. And he knew something about me and he was able to reflect that to me. So that's kind of our vision with CareerSpan is having a career companion to kind of accompany you at all of these different pivot points and inflection points throughout your career that you need, you know, somebody to help you out a little bit. So I love the name CareerSpan. How did you come up with it? All of Rigen, I wish I could take credit. He'll hear this and be like, yeah, it was me. But we were talking a lot about what our vision was and around this companion element.

5:57And I think that we talk a lot about longevity and health and purpose, you know, when it comes to lifespan or even your financial health, right? It's like, okay, how can you check in on what you're doing in these different aspects of your life? But careers is often very reactive. It's, oh, I've gotten laid off, I need to find a new job or whatever it is. And it's something that happens to you a lot of the time. And I think that we really saw a possibility in terms of, let's think about this in a proactive way and how you can leverage your own resources, your skills, your stories, your experiences to advocate for yourself.

6:33So why do we need an AI powered or an AI career coach? You know, when we look at trends that are happening right now, I don't know if you've heard the term 60-year career? No. So it's, I think, coined by a Stanford professor. So this is not mine, but it's well-established research around increased human longevity. We're living longer. We're working longer. We're pushing retirement back. So it's no longer 40 years. It's now probably more like 60 years. And then if you combine that with, you know, Gen Z has an average job duration of about 2.2 years now. So if you do that math and you're looking at maybe, you know, people are changing every two to three years.

7:11It's no longer at the same company for 20 years. You're actually looking at potentially between like 30, maybe 35 different jobs throughout your lifetime. And a lot of those will be in different careers, in different settings. You know, maybe I want to change jobs. Maybe I also want to invest time in or money in upskilling. All of these inflection points is not just about changing jobs. A lot of people do not have access to the type of help and personalized support that would really guide them in these moments of time. Yeah, I love that. In a way, you are literally democratizing access to these career coaches.

7:49I'm reading a book. It's called The Wealth Money Can't Buy by Robin Sharma. And there's basically, I think there are eight, I'm halfway through the book. So there's eight different types of wealth. And one of them is health. And one of them is financial wealth. And then, of course, your relationships. And one of them is your craft, right? And it's kind of how do you draw meaning and purpose from your work? And does career span help you think through that? Yeah, I think it really does. You know, I use the product fairly frequently. But you know, when it comes to the busyness of day to day living, right, you're picking your kids up, you're doing all these things.

8:26Self-reflection often feels a little bit like a luxury in the sense that you're not going to sit down and like journal necessarily. Some people do and I have full of admiration. I don't, I can't seem to find the time sometimes, but I think it's, you know, when you actually reflect on, let's say a project that you're doing at work or, and it can be in the past as well. It's like, okay, well, I was managing this team or whatever it is by talking about it and engaging in that reflection, you're really engaging in metacognition, which is thinking about thinking, right? So you're actually kind of retelling the story to yourself in a way that is really powerful because you're then reflecting on, okay, I actually did use this skill set.

9:10Huh, I wouldn't have thought of that. You're seeing each experience through the lens of where you are now, right? And you know more now. So you're like, okay, actually, I do think that I was learning how to manage, you know, cross-cultural teams or whatever it is. And you're like, I now see a different myself in a different light. So what really excites me when I talk to users all day long and I talk to job seekers all day long and such a key part of what I really am proud of with Career Spans conversation model is that people feel a sense of confidence. So when you have this idea of, okay, let me reflect on and, you know, whether it's, you know, the craft and you're reflecting on what you've done, you get lost in the day to day, right?

9:52Like you're like, Like, oh, okay, like I just did this thing. And having this supportive, this kind of guided conversation where it's like, oh, it sounds like you've been really collaborating with lots of different types of people. And you're like, I guess I have. And it gives you a sense of when you're telling that story, it's like a sense of self-efficacy, which is a very kind of education term. But self-efficacy is very closely related to growth mindset. And it gives you a sense of what is possible in your own future because you're like, I am capable of doing this. And so that's really what excites me because it's giving you that sense of confidence in what you're capable of.

10:25So I want to give our listeners a sense of how career span works. And I was thinking about this, and Jenna, my daughter, is a senior at Harvard. And so she's in the midst of this, right? She's really thinking through what she wants to do next. So if she were using career span, what would the experience look and feel like? So, you know, with our first product, we're really trying to tackle the problem of that transition phase, right? Where it's like, okay, I've done some things. I've studied some things. I've taken some interesting classes. I have years of work experience. And I'm going for this particular role.

10:58I have it in mind. The end is in sight. But how do I map my experiences onto the responsibilities that I will hold? So what you do is you upload your resume. It asks you, you know, what that target role is. And then it essentially gives you what we're calling the roadmap, where it's taking what it knows about you from that brief glimpse. And the resume is a pretty poor data set, right? It's very 2D. It's super like squashed down into one or two bullet points. And then it maps onto the responsibilities of that role. So let's say that you're going to be a project manager. For each responsibility, it suggests a story that you could use from your experiences, whether it's a project that your daughter's done or whether it's an internship.

11:40and it says, hey, this sounds like a good fit to talk about why you would be really good at this particular responsibility. Why don't we go into a conversation? And you can choose what that looks like, right? So you can say, oh, I don't actually want to talk about that one. So it gives you suggestions and you can be like, nah, I don't like that one. So we're trying to enable that user agency, right? And like, then you go into this kind of guided conversation, which it's, you know, not hard coded at all. It feels like a really supportive friend is listening to you, like that kind of the aunt or uncle that you meet with for a coffee and they're like, oh, tell me a little bit more about that.

12:12So they're pushing your thinking a little bit, right? It's about a five to 10 minute conversation. You can talk, you can type whatever you feel comfortable with. Some users like talking. We do encourage talking just because not as many people have that practice of verbally storytelling. But if you feel more comfortable typing, that's fine too. We do support over 30 language inputs as well. So if you're more comfortable speaking, you know, in If it's an area of strength, it starts to you have almost like a deck of cards. It's like I have all of these stories and this story is about how I'm really adaptable.

12:46And then it tells you essentially how to use that in an interview. It's how to use it in a networking situation. So you essentially have all of these artifacts to get you ready to go into the application process. So that's our first product kind of in a nutshell. And presumably CareerSpan then remembers all these nuggets of stories so that the next time, I don't know, you're applying for a promotion or you're transitioning again, it can remind you like Vision did with you when you were applying to Harvard? Yeah. So we like to kind of, instead of, you know, Vision and I got to know each other over years and working together.

13:21And we'd like to think that CareerSpan can get to know you much faster, right? So the more information that you give CareerSpan, the more stories that you tell, the more that we can do for you. So it is building out this kind of mental model of your experiences. I talk to job seekers all day, but like one of the biggest problems that we see, and it's a real problem, is that I don't remember what I did. I don't have any recollection of what that project was. And so essentially what we think of is marrying these skills that you're building in a job and the stories that communicate them. And it's building in essentially like a career IP, right?

13:58That is what makes you marketable in the job market is your skills and your stories. And we're creating a repository for you to be able to bring from one company to the next company. When you change jobs, when you go from this to that to being a grad student or going to a new industry or a new country, it goes with you in a way that you can continue adding to it. It's an ongoing dialogue that really gives you a kind of dynamic understanding of yourself. And the system is updating dynamically as well. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, Logan explains why career span is different than, say, ChatGPT and why we still need human career coaches in the age of AI.

14:42Stay with us.

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15:39For the savvy AI prompters listening right now you might already use your chatbot of choice as a sounding board for your career questions I know that I do so I was curious how is career span different? So I'm sure there's a lot of our listeners who are thinking, how is this different than ChatGPT? And I want to give you an example for myself. So a while ago, I sold my company. And at some point, I was like, OK, let me kind of think about what am I going to do next? And so I actually prompted ChatGPT. I said, you're an executive career coach. You are advising Rana Elkhal-Yubi on what she wants to do next with her career.

16:17And I said, she's an AI thought leader, entrepreneur, scientist, investor. and I actually pasted my LinkedIn profile, right? And I was like, okay, what kind of career ideas do you have for Rana? And it came up with stuff that like, you know, you'd expect, like, you know, do an AI council, like a women in AI fund. I was like, okay, interesting. An AI incubator, all like made sense. Speak at global AI conferences. And then I was like, come on, these are good, but they're not really creative, right? So I was like, additionally, Rana loves chocolates and mangoes. So then it was like, ooh, like do the Choco Tech Summit or like Mango AI Farming or like, this is my favorite, a subscription box.

16:58Launch a monthly subscription box that delivers unique chocolate, mango and smoothie recipes. And the twist, it's AI that curates it. Anyway, fun stuff. But why can people like not just use ChatGPT? Why do they need career spam? Sure. I mean, I love using ChatGPT for all of that kind of stuff. And I think that it's valuable to explore. Absolutely. I think the big question for a lot of people is, what's next? You know, like, how do you break it down? And don't get me wrong, Chai TBT, if you give it the right prompts, it can probably give you a whole, you know, 10-page document on how exactly you can go about this.

17:31But I think, you know, just because the information is out there doesn't make it accessible to every person. So I think it comes to the process. And this is where, you know, my own background in education and kind of learning design comes in where I'm like, okay, well, how do we break down this information to meet you where you are? So if you tell me, okay, I'm thinking about changing a job in six months, cool. Well, I'll give you a game plan to do that in six months. And yes, I think if you really wanted to, you could probably make your own game plan with ChatGPT for sure, but it's not going to necessarily know you in that same way because what is it basing that recommendation off of, right?

18:11So mangoes and you're like, okay, cool, a subscription box with mangoes. But like, if you give it data set in terms of your experiences, that's really what we're basing it on. Because then it's like, okay, cool. Based on your goal, we know a lot about you in a very positive way. And it's like, we can break down those steps for you in a kind of scaffolded way. Like, let's break it down. How can I take you from where you are now to where you want to be without making it just go do this? So on this podcast, we often talk about the implications of AI on jobs. You're building an AI career coach. What can this coach offer that a real human coach like you couldn't?

18:54Ooh, that's a good one. I mean, accessibility is the first thing that comes to mind in terms of both cost and time. Somebody who is essentially available to you 24-7, you don't have to schedule it on Friday at 2 p.m. or whatever it is. So I think, like, just the constant availability is one. I also think that, you know, when you're building this relationship over time, human memory, as we said, is very fallible. It is able to really access that information of everything that you've told it about it. So that about yourself and about your experiences, you know, in the future, we plan on having, you know, you can forward it your performance evaluations or kind of your self-evaluations and bring in different aspects of your own professional kind of identity and experiences in a way that then really opens up some interesting opportunities in terms of not only informal learning, like in the workplace.

19:44Like what actually, is it picking up on skills that I wouldn't even necessarily know that I'm building at the moment? Cool. And then if it brings that up to me, what are options that I could do with that? Do I want to continue to build out that skill set? Where could I go if I were to? Is there anything career span can't do that we still need humans for? Of course. I mean, I think that there's we're actually starting a few pilot programs with institutions who are working with cohorts of students, you know, either at the graduate level or upskilling programs. And we're essentially saying to them very honestly that like this is helping you be more efficient in your time, because a lot of times these human career coaches maybe are working on a one to seventeen hundred student ratio.

20:32So they don't have the time to like devote to all of this kind of skill building and communication and all this stuff. So, you know, where we say is that it fits into that flow of whatever your own programming is. So you can have exploratory conversations with a student. Fantastic. And then you send them to CareerSpam and they complete their roadmap. You have access, if they grant it to you, to see some of those stories and to see their artifacts. And then you come back to the human career coach and you're like, OK, I need the empathy. I need the excitement. I need the strategy that only human to human interaction, I think, can really offer.

21:08So it's certainly not an end to end solution, because at the end of the day, I think, especially when it comes to careers and when it comes to these big decision points, we're not trying to make that decision for you. We're trying to help you reflect on what factors should go into that decision based on your experiences, based on a real understanding of who you are at this point in time. And that's when it's whether or not you have access to a career center or a mentor or, you know, somebody that you meet at a networking event or a coffee. You know, everyone gets really scared of networking and they're like, what should I even say?

21:42if you have a better sense of who you are and what you're looking for and you're able to communicate that cogently, confidently, super clearly, then that's going to open up doors for you as well, right? So it's not about replacing any human interaction, but it's about optimizing those touch points that you do have to make sure that you're getting as much information as you can. There's a big concern in general, right, about AI replacing people's jobs. Do you see that with any of the users you work with? And if so, how do you help them navigate this concern? The big question, the elephant in every room, I think, these days, there's replacing jobs, there's augmenting jobs, there's creating jobs, right?

22:24We talk to a lot of people who've unfortunately been laid off, whether it's because of business decisions around, you know, prioritizing budget for future AI developments or whatever that is. And I think that's where if you've been laid off, it's all of those kind of pain points that we talked about with a career transition all in one, you know, pretty devastating time period. And so it's like, okay, now I need to get a new job and figure out what I should say and kind of figure out all the things that I have done before. And it's a shame because some people actually get locked out of their systems, right?

22:54They don't have access to their email or their calendars anymore from their previous comments. So then they're like, I don't even remember what I did and I can't access the ways in which that I could go back and kind of double check. So I think that's another reason that we see a real need for a tool like CareerSpan to be that repository for people's work in many ways in that portfolio. Because if you're actively building that over the course of, you know, of a year or two or however long, then if you do get laid off, and I think that's something on the back of everybody's mind is like, will I be replaced at some point?

23:25Well, that's exactly when you need to be able to pivot quickly and effectively and start to build out these other options to be proactive. On this podcast, we've had Hilke Shelman on. She's an investigative journalist and she wrote a book kind of uncovering some of the biases that exist in hiring when a lot of companies are using AI for hiring and firing and promoting people. And it's often because there's a lot of unconscious bias built into these platforms. How do you help your users kind of navigate kind of on the other end when they're applying? A lot of these companies are using AI. Do you run into that?

24:04And how do you help your users navigate some of these biases? And also, I guess, how do you avoid building biases into career span? Yeah, it's a question on everybody's mind. And it should be because, you know, whether humans are biased with unconscious biases and how are we building this into systems and proxies that make their way into a lot of these algorithms. I was able to actually read Hilke's book, and it was fantastic. From our perspective, you know, there's so much noise in the market right now. Companies are really trying to test out a lot of, you know, new AI tools within their own hiring, whether it's video interviews, whether it's asynchronous kind of screening calls, whether it's, you know, tinkering with the ATS algorithms, everything like this.