AI and Professional Identity Development
Can AI Clarify Your Professional Identity?
AI is everywhere, and like everyone, I'm trying to figure out how to best use it in my life, research, and work.
My husband and I are constantly comparing notes on the latest prompt we put in ChatGPT (my husband likes to use it for recipe advice and writing LinkedIn posts. I ask it for research support and business tips). In fact, we just signed up for the Section AI Academy to more formally learn with top AI instructors.
I also listened to a great episode recently on the 4-Quarter Lives Podcast with guest Graham Heddle where he discussed how he used ChatGPT for AI Powered career moves!
He programmed it to understand his personal growth journey and used it to inform deep reflection. He wanted to find new purpose after leaving a long-term career. You'll have to listen to see what insights he gained and how. It's fascinating.
The number of use cases for AI is growing, and the results are mixed.
Can AI help you develop your professional identity or figure out your hybridity in the workforce?
This was a question a recent group course participant asked, and she set out to test it.
There's a step during my course where everyone is developing a name for their hybrid professional identity. Up to this point, they've done a lot of reflection on what their core professional identities are, and what they're actually doing at the intersection where their multiple professional identities overlap.
After they've mapped emerging themes and keywords about themselves, it's time to start putting it all together. I call this step "hybridizing" yourself.
Coming up with the exact language to name your hybrid professional identity is a challenge. It's one of the hardest and most rewarding steps of my process.
I emphasize that it requires play, creativity, and more art than science. You can't force your hybrid title through effort, instead, you need to experiment with keywords by rearranging them, substituting them, and recombining them like poetry. This activity is a form of "professional identity math."
During the hybridizing section, this is when the course participant used ChatGPT. She wanted to see how it could help her devise new combinations of keywords to provide inspiration for her hybridity.
To inform the AI, she provided all kinds of details, like stories about herself in her work, and other items we had done as exercises in the group course.
What Happened: How well did AI do?
ChatGPT returned these results as possible hybrid titles for her:
Creative Publishing Strategist
Creative Publishing Consultant
Creative Event Design Consultant
(As a reminder, your hybrid title is the name for your authentic professional identity. It sums up who you are at the intersection of your other work identities. It should have intrigue, vigor, and differentiate you from other people).
Certainly, none of the AI results have a "WOW" factor.
In fact, they're pretty boring and generic. AI was able to generate a lot of results for this student, so many that she became overwhelmed (and underwhelmed) by the options.
But in the end, she was disappointed.
"ChatGPT couldn't really come up with anything," she told me later. "It was really hard to give instructions."
The title she created for her hybridity became: Fantastical Designs Creator because she works at the intersection of event planning, decorating and storytelling. This is a far cry from the direction AI was going.
We discussed why AI couldn't come up with the "right" title, and what happened when she used ChatGBT.
Why AI Can't Define Your Professional Identity
I'll say it again, I'm still a novice at AI. I'm sure there are those of you who have created AI friends who can give you smart, inspiring, and reflective feedback about yourself. I believe that's possible based on the interview I posted above with Graham Heddle.
However, to get to that point, it takes at least:
the power of the most recent version of ChatGPT, which you have to pay for
and a lot of work and patience to develop AI where it understands you because it knows enough about you to synthesize information. It needs A LOT of info.
The main reasons ChatGPT couldn't provide great results or suggestions of a hybrid title for my student were:
it didn't have enough information about her
and it's not a creative tool. I don't see AI as a robust way of putting ideas in and getting novel, inventive creations out.
New insights on data? Yes, AI can deliver that.
Inventing new terminology, new lexicons, neologisms and portmanteaus?
No, AI can't do that, yet. It doesn't know how to break rules and when to do so.
They say with AI the quality you put in is what you get out...poor prompts lead to poor answers. That may be partially why it created such stiff hybrid titles. It needed to know SO MUCH, MUCH MORE about my student to even begin to scratch the surface of who she truly is in her work.
Overall, to be a reflective engine of self-growth and personal development, especially in terms of seeing your professional identity, we have a way to go before AI can be that tool.
For now, we must investigate ourselves through self-inquiry, working with people who can be our mirrors, and practicing more self-awareness.