I have made non-conventional career moves driven by curiosity and desire to explore emerging tools or problems that are interesting to me.

While the moves may seem clear to me, it’s not clear to most people.

Moreover, circumstances and opportunities that come may have aligned with my goals in the past but may not necessarily be so for my current goals.

Does it function like a chatbot with résumé? No.

A résumé is a compressed summary written for an external audience. It rarely captures the full context behind my career: the projects I am proud of, the stakeholder feedback I have received, the environments in which I thrive, or the values that shape my decisions.

Having a Career Navigator who understands my career history and my current goals helps to provide perspectives when navigating career decisions over time.

Professional Background, Goals, and Personality

I share with my career navigator the following information :

1. Detailed career history and professional background

This includes every project that I was involved in, and anything that demonstrates my technical skills and impact to stakeholder(s).

I also detail soft skills I have demonstrated in these projects through stories and, where possible, apply the STAR method (which would be useful for interviews).

Note: While context is key, keep in mind not to share private and confidential company information, personal identifiers, and anything you would not be comfortable storing in the system you use.

2. Goals and Values

I share what are my current career goals and how I plan to achieve it. The plan or goal can be refined over time as I continue conversing and relaying my experiences with the Career Navigator.

Perhaps my goals are not realistic in the timeframe that I plan to achieve, or perhaps my plan is not optimal given the current conditions… The Career Navigator will share its point of view and I will decide how to recalibrate my goals or plans.

3. Personality assessment results

Similar to the information I shared with my journalling agent, I included personality assessments that provide insights into how I work. This way, I understand myself better in the context of professional work, and I have a feedback loop for my blind spots.

For example, I can be perfectionist and I will keep iterating over a piece of work forever, until I achieve what I envisioned but this is not optimal nor is it strategic with limited time or resource. By understanding my inclinations, it forces me to challenge what I think is the best way by providing alternate perspectives grounded by logic.

The Career Navigator is not merely storing these information, but it would be able to reason across all the information that it knows about me through these artifacts.

This shared context improves the quality of the conversation I have with the Career Navigator, so it would not give generic advice that you get by simply chatting with any other LLMs.

For example, it can critically answer:

  • Does this opportunity fit my values and preferred working environment?
  • Which of my experiences are most relevant for this role?
  • How should I position a non-linear career story?

That said, the Career Navigator should not be making my career decisions on my behalf. That is not the objective here.

Its role is to be a thinking partner when navigating my career. It surfaces patterns, retrieve evidence, challenge inconsistencies and translate a large collection of experiences into a clear story.

Keep a running record of Impact

One of the most useful applications is maintaining a current brag sheet.

Achievements are easiest to document while details are still fresh. After several months, it would be difficult to remember the exact metric or the stakeholder’s feedback.

These entries become evidence that can :

  • support a promotion case,
  • strengthen performance review,
  • improve a resume or
  • transformed into STAR stories for interviews.

Bridge for Career Continuity

Careers are increasingly non-linear as people move between functions, industries and different forms of work. Most of us (or at least most that I know) develop valuable skills in side projects, volunteer roles, and experiments that may never appear in an official job description.

The Career Navigator provides continuity across all of these experiences. It helps identify the thread connecting them: the problems I choose to solve, the strengths I rely on, the environments where I perform best, and the impact that I want my work to have.

And I think this thread is what makes each of us unique in what we bring to the table. 🙂