Mailbag: “I was recently laid off. Can AI help me figure out what to do next?”
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fix with two X's. Let's grow your portfolio one smart decision at a time. Or if you have a question that's at the top of your head that you just can't quite sort through that maybe can't be solved with a simple Google search, opening up an AI tool and just starting with a simple question is the best way to get started. And the more you get used to that conversational nature, the stronger you'll get at learning what these tools are capable of.

Hey everyone, I'm Jean Chatzky. Thanks so much for joining us today on Her Money for a special AI-themed mailbag with Celia Quillian, author of AI for Life. I hope you all caught our earlier episode with Celia where we covered how

How to use AI for everything from resume writing to taxes to buying your next car. We heard from many of you who have follow-up questions about how we can use AI in our everyday lives. So today, we are going to dig into a few of those. Celia, first of all, thanks for coming back. Yeah, it's great to be back again. Are you ready to tackle some of these? Let's have at it.

Okay, first question from Michelle. She writes, I was recently laid off after 20 years at the same company. I'm so sorry to hear that, but we are going to, we're going to help. I was really out of practice with resumes and I want to put my best foot forward when applying. I'm also wondering if I should be making a career shift.

How can I use AI to create an impressive resume and cover letter and get past the ATS bots? That is key. And is there a way to prompt chat GPT where I can put in my skills and desires for my next role and it gives me some new career suggestions? Great question. What do you think?

Absolutely. AI can definitely help with this. I'm going to start with the second question about career kind of navigation. If you go to any generative AI tool like ChatGPT and provide context on, this is the work that I've done in the past. This is what I've always been told I'm very skilled at. Maybe these are the things that I'm less good at or less excited about. These are the industries that interest me. These are the industries that I fit in. Here are some personal passions. Can you please coach me through 10

10 potential career paths I should consider that would pay between this much and this much, you know, dollars a year in salary in this particular area of wherever you live or wherever you would like to be living. It will provide you some suggestions, take into account all of that context. And you can ask follow-up questions as well. What skill sets would I need to advance into this career that I may not have currently and provide a outline of how you might acquire those skills if you don't have them yet.

So it can be a great career coach of discovering new opportunities that maybe you didn't know were out there or existed, and according to the goals that you have. So yes, it can absolutely help with that. Now on the resume standpoint, obviously applying to jobs is a grueling process. There are so many different things you have to do. And we know that the best practice

practice is to customize your resume a little bit for every job you apply to according to those keywords that are in the applicant tracking systems. Companies have been using these forever, have been using AI to parse their resumes. So now it's the time for us to use AI to get ourselves to the top of the stack. How I would approach this is use a tool that allows you to do attachments. ChatGPT on the free version does let you do that a couple of chats a day, as well as Perplexity and Clawed.

If you attach your current resume or if you don't have a current resume, speak out loud anything that you can provide about what you've done over the past year. Ask it to give you suggestions on how you can craft those into really well-structured, action-verb-oriented, data-rich bullet points for your resume. And you can also attach those job descriptions and then ask it to recognize what

what keywords are within this job description that are perhaps lacking in my resume? How do I best incorporate them? And you can also say what keywords are in the job description that I may have more difficulty weaving into my existing resume.

Ask me 10 questions about my career that I might be able to help fill in those gaps with. And through this collaborative process, you can end up with a really stellar resume that you vet for accuracy to make sure it speaks to you through that collaborative process. And once you have it started for every job you apply for, you can repeat that process. Here's the job description. What are the keywords that are showing up the most that I should use to get through applicant tracking systems, the top of that resume stack.

And how do I adjust that resume from there? And finally, from the cover letter standpoint, you can even ask it to write you a rough draft of an early cover letter. You can include as an example in quotation marks, some writing samples that you've done in the past or a cover letter you've written in the past. So it sounds like you. And then of course, always read through and make sure that it is something that you want to be sending off and it'll just accelerate your process so much.

This may be a ridiculous question, but does ChatGPT ever make typos or grammatical errors? Only if you ask it to. So very, very rarely. The biggest thing to be aware of is it's guessing. It's predicting the best possible answer. So you just want to make sure that all of the bullet points that do appear in that resume that you've generated are actually things that you can say that you have done. Amazing. All right. Our next question comes from Brianne. She says, how can I use

generative AI to keep track of home maintenance and chores. I don't necessarily need to track daily chores like loading the dishwasher, but more things like cleaning the gutters, rotating the mattress, deep cleaning the baseboards, changing filters, and wiping the fronts of the kitchen cabinets. Our Google Calendar is so full, I don't want to add tasks there, but I want a way to check the task off when it's complete.

and ideally be able to see it on a recurring annual basis.

that person is a lot more organized than I am. Same, same. While I expect very soon, if there's not one already, that there is probably a tool that has an AI powered tool that has those checkbox processes. The Internet of AI can't do that full flow unless you want to code your own app with it, which is possible, but that's a little bit higher tech than I think I'd like to go. But I can talk through a couple of capabilities that ChatGPT and these other tools have. So first to start, you can ask it to create you an annual schedule.

What tasks should I be doing on a weekly, monthly, biannual, annual basis to maintain my home to the best possible? Cover these rooms, cover these scenarios, make me a schedule.

From there, you can ask it to convert it into a table format that you might then copy paste into a spreadsheet where you can add a little column where you can have the checkbox and do all your little formatting. You can ask ChatGPT how best to format that spreadsheet to your liking. And another capability that's newer that ChatGPT has is actually scheduled tasks, which could be interesting. This is a capability within the app that will actually send you a notification to your phone at the date and time that you request at any frequency request.

That also includes any kind of context within the starter chat that you might have asked for. So for example, if you say I want to clean my baseboards once a month, every month on the third Friday or on this day of the month, send me a reminder to do that. That also includes some special tips and tricks that I should keep in mind when approaching this task. It will literally do that and send you a reminder to your phone that you can tap into and read off.

Will chat GPT interface with my calendar? Not at this time directly, but there are probably tools out there that are new generative AI tools are popping up regularly. So I imagine we're not too far off if there's not one already that will allow you to work with your calendar more directly. But I don't use one currently and there might be one. I'm just not familiar. Before we take our last two questions and take a break, I just want to know how you got so good at this.

And how much you had to practice in order to get good at this and how much you think regular people need to practice in order to just be proficient?

Sure. I started using ChatGPT pretty much the week or two after it came out and then became just utterly obsessed. I had those moment of fear of, oh my gosh, this is going to change everything, but this is also so cool. And I literally could not stop. I mean, the curiosity of figuring out what was going on with it and what it could do. I probably spent an hour a day at least just engaging with it in those early days. Since then, I started my Smart Work AI channel and have

kept pulse with what's going on in the industry. But I will say the main thing that you as a normal individual that may not have this unhealthy obsession, perhaps that I have with these tools can do is find an app that you like all of these general purpose tools like Gemini, chat, GPT, Claude have amazing free versions, where you can start to

you know, change a habit. If you would normally go to Google or if you have a question that's at the top of your head that you just can't quite sort through that maybe can't be solved with a simple Google search,

Opening up an AI tool and just starting with a simple question is the best way to get started. I did not start with very long and robust prompts. Starting with questions is a great way to begin. And the more you get used to that conversational nature, the stronger you'll get at learning what these tools are capable of. So in terms of what we need to get ahead, I think if you start with that foundation and approach it with curiosity and, oh, well, that was interesting. I wonder if it could help me with this.

the further and further you'll progress in learning how to interact with them. Fantastic. We're going to take a very quick break.

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And we are back. We're talking with Celia Quillian, author of AI for Life. We've got a question from Yvonne. She writes, I'm in my mid-40s and I want to learn more about generative AI so I don't fall behind in my career. Are there any free courses you recommend? LinkedIn Learning has some, but I'd love your opinion on the most effective ones.

Sure. So as I just said, I did a lot of learning by doing, which I think is a great way to start. But there are a lot of great, free, very robust, modularized generative AI courses offered by a lot of the kind of like the leaders in the AI industry. So if you go and search for Google has one as a generative AI foundations course, not overly technical starts with the basics.

A total beginner can start with it. Microsoft has one, Amazon Web Services as well. I have not taken any of them, but I have seen many people that have said that they're great. And I imagine because they're coming from these companies that are kind of leaders in the space, they would be great. So there is a plethora of available free courses out there. I would not start by paying for anything because there are things that are free out there.

I love that you have so many free resources. Last question, Celia. This is from Mary Lee. My husband and I have recently retired. We're planning a trip from the Twin Cities in Minnesota to Portland, Oregon. We both like to get out and walk around and see interesting sights, and we aren't on a super tight timeline for the drive. We're in our mid-60s, so frequent bathroom breaks are needed.

I've heard AI can be helpful when planning a trip, but I'm not sure if I can trust it for things like deals on hotels or ideas for routes to use. What do you think?

You can, at least for the definitely for the ideas for routes to use for deals on hotels, hotel prices change regularly and daily, it can give you a good sense of this is the price range different hotels along your route might be at. And then of course, you'll want to go and check and make sure that that's what you want and book them yourselves. But the great thing about that request right there, Jean, is that you can book them yourself.

That first half of all of those desires and wants and needs and where we're going and what we like to do, perfect starter prompt.

You take that, you put it into chat GPT and say, I would like you to create an itinerary for me that roughly lasts however many days you want to be on the road and suggest places to stop off, suggest hotels to stay at in this price range based off of historical prices or based off of what your estimated current prices are. And it will give you an itinerary that then if you're using web search, you can click through on and read more about.

So we're talking about how to effectively prompt those tools. That question right there was a perfect prompt. Love it. Celia, where can we go to find more of you and more knowledge as this field just changes by the day, week, month, or year? Absolutely. I'm on TikTok and Instagram as SmartWorkAI, as well as YouTube. On LinkedIn, I'm Celia Quillian. And if you're interested in AI for Life, it's available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Target.

Amazing. Thank you so much for being with us today, earlier in the week. We just so appreciate the education. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. It's been great talking about this with you. And thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you next time. If you loved this episode, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

Her Money has two incredible programs, Finance Fix, which is designed to give you the ultimate money makeover, and Investing Fix, which is our investing club for women that meets biweekly on Zoom. With both programs, we are leveling the playing fields for women's financial confidence and power. I would love to see you there.

Her Money is produced by Haley Pascalides. Our music is provided by Video Helper and our show comes to you through Megaphone. Thanks for joining us and we'll talk soon.