Career planning is one of the major challenges facing students whose graduation is just around the corner. Defining a career path on your own can be extremely hard. So that’s where guidance practitioners step in to help young people identify the right direction for their future. Or that’s where they used to step in before.
Looking to enhance and empower the field of career planning, IT specialists started leveraging AI and chatbots to deliver better, more personalized guidance to students. While some people may be skeptical about the use of technology in this sector, there is a whole range of benefits that chatbots and AI can bring to the career planning field.
What are these benefits? And how can these technologies help students plan their future careers better? In this article, an expert academic assistant from EssayService, an essay help service for students, is going to help us get clear on this topic. Let’s dive in!
AI-Powered Career Advisors Are There for You 24/7
A typical student’s life is incredibly busy. It often involves a lot of studying, homework, part-time work, and extracurriculars. And there still should be some time left for friends and family. Living at such a high pace, students know the real value of 24/7 services better than anyone else.
The effectiveness of career guidance is always determined by the level (and scope) of career assistance students receive. Given their busy schedules, you can imagine that students don’t have much time for receiving face-to-face guidance. So, as a result, the majority of young people receive very little or no career planning assistance. But AI and chatbots can solve this problem.
By integrating these technologies into the career planning sphere, we can ensure that students have access to such services right when they need them. With these technologies, we can make professional guidance available 24/7. Respectively, every student will be able to receive the needed, personalized help on their own schedule.
Career Advice on the Go
Since we are talking about how busy student lives are, it is worth noting that young people crave to receive professional services not only at whatever time feels right for them but also from whatever location they are at.
What does this mean in terms of in-person guidance? Basically, the only way to ensure that career planning services are available to students on the go is to provide them online. Today, some career advice experts do offer online sessions. But there are not too many of them. And those that do, typically offer to run sessions via one of the video-chat tools, which requires students on the other end to have a very stable internet connection. Needless to say, students do not always have a stable connection on the go. But chatbots can be the answer to the problem.
Since chatbots are pretty lightweight, they don’t require your connection to be as stable as for, let’s say, a video call. In addition, Chatbots can be accessed from both WiFi and cellular connection, which offers students more flexibility.
Apart from this, chatbots can be easily used from any device, both desktop and mobile. Thanks to this, if we adopt AI-powered chatbots in career planning, we can make such services easily accessible to students at any time of the day and from any location. This way, young people will be able to get professional guidance even on the go. And this is a good thing.
Personalization at Scale
Another massive benefit of using AI and chatbots in career guidance is that these technologies can help us take the personalization of such services to an entirely new level.
It is possible due to several reasons. First and foremost, AI enables chatbots to receive and process large chunks of data in nearly no time. As a result, such chatbots can know every student’s full profile in a few seconds and then use it to deliver personalized assistance.
Secondly, it is worth noting that AI-powered chatbots are designed to identify every person’s intent. It means that when a particular student is writing to a chatbot with a certain goal, the chatbot will quickly identify it and address it appropriately.
This way, a combination of AI and chatbots in the career planning field can help us ensure more accurate and personalized advice for every student seeking guidance.
Better Questions for Better Advice
A huge part of success in career guidance depends on the correctness of a student’s questions. And there is no need to say that students who have never received advice before will likely have no idea what questions to ask.
Eventually, the entire process can go wrong. Students approach their career advisors with simple and obvious (in their opinion) questions. But if these questions are not formulated clearly, asking them can lead to being directed in the wrong direction or, often, to a careers website or some information sheet. As a result, students feel like they haven’t received any real help and give up on career planning at all. But chatbots can solve this problem too.
Instead of giving up on a student who asks the wrong questions, an AI-powered chatbot can actually help prompt the right questions. Moreover, in the process of helping students formulate a correct query, chatbots can also provide them with additional helpful information relevant to their concerns.
Helping Uncover New Paths
The next benefit of bringing AI and chatbots to the career planning service industry is that these technologies can help students see the whole range of opportunities that are open to them.
Human advisors are always limited by their own experience and knowledge. In addition, they are often bound by prejudice and certain stereotypes. That’s just in human nature. And due to these reasons, human advisors may not always be able to provide accurate and personalized enough advice to every student.
AI-powered chatbots, on the contrary, have access to all data available on the web, including critical labor market information, insights, and stats. Respectively, chatbots can provide students with more unbiased advice and maybe even show them career directions that they’ve never considered before but that can match their personalities and needs.
Safety and Convenience
Finally, it is worth noting that not all students feel comfortable discussing their future careers with a human advisor during face-to-face sessions. In fact, they can feel rather anxious about this. They might feel afraid of sharing their career objectives because of possible bias and judgment. Besides, young people can be unsure of what questions to ask and, thus, feel rather insecure during their sessions with career advisors. And this brings us to the last benefit of AI and chatbots in this sphere.
When communicating with a chatbot, students can remain anonymous, which helps create a convenient and safe space for every student, where they will feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas.
Secondly, as we mentioned earlier, AI-powered chatbots can nudge students in the right direction and help them find the right questions. Therefore, young people won’t have to worry or feel unconfident because of not knowing what questions to ask.
Finally, there is one more argument in favor of using chatbots in the career planning sphere. Since these chatbots can create a safe and convenient space for every student, most likely young people will have positive experiences of getting career advice. This can encourage them to seek further assistance with career planning. Namely, after trying chatbots, students can feel more confident to talk to a human advisor later. As a result, the scale and quality of career advice services can increase significantly, helping more and more students find the right career path for themselves.
The Bottom Line
In the conclusion of this article, let’s quickly recap the main benefits of integrating AI-powered chatbots in the career planning field:
- It will make career advice services available right when students need them;
- It will make career planning services available on the go;
- It will create more opportunities for personalization;
- It can help students ask the right questions about their future careers;
- It can help young people discover new career paths;
- It will create a convenient and safe space where students won’t be afraid to ask for help.
The benefits are clear. Based on them, we can confidently say that AI and chatbots have the potential to change the quality of career planning services for the better, making them more personalized, comfortable, and accurate than ever before.
But will this mean the end of face-to-face career guidance? Not really. Of course, by leveraging AI-powered chatbots for delivering better career planning services, we can create experiences good enough to make students want to get such services exclusively from chatbots. But that’s not likely to happen. According to experts, the convenience and flexibility students can get while interacting with a chatbot will eventually encourage them to seek additional guidance. Based on this, we can conclude that there will always be space for face-to-face career planning services.
