Remote Work Retirement

How to use AI to identify your top skills

• Camille Attell

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In episode 91 Camille explores how to use artificial intelligence to identify your top skills.  

You're listening to the remote work retirement show. I'm your host, Camille Attell. And this is the only show that helps semi retirees figure out their remote work options.  I believe that remote work is the new retirement plan and that many retirees have both the ability and desire to work how they want so they can live how they want. Let's dig into today's episode.

Welcome back to the Remote Work Retirement Show. if this is your first time listening, no worries. There will be lots of really good information in this episode for you, even if you're just starting. However, if you do want to go back and catch a couple of episodes before this, it might help because Camille does set the tone for the topics she is covering this month.

In the previous episodes she talked about what's happening in the job market and what you can expect, how we're still seeing a pretty strong job market, and how there are new opportunities being created. Then she talked about the reality of using AI to write your resume. There was an article that she explored, that link in last week's episode, Episode 90, that talked about how not only is it a good idea to use AI for your resume, but HR managers and those who hire employees actually prefer it. She talked about why that is in last week's episode.

So, she is not going to cover it all again. Camille also left off in that episode talking about a couple of tools that she wanted to explore and then bring to you in today's episode, as well as next week's episode. So today Camille is actually going to talk about how to use AI to unlock your skills to really identify the top skills that you have so that you can display those skills on your resume, on LinkedIn, maybe in a cover letter, and certainly when you're having an interview.

The idea is that you can very quickly and very easily talk about your top 5 to 10 skills and that you really understand how to swap out your skills when needed for different job types. I talk in Remote Work School, that's my coaching program, a lot to the members there about how it's really important that you're very nimble with your resume, with your skills, LinkedIn, and just your job searching in general. One of the ways to be nimble. Is to have a nice set of skills that you can always pull from and use for different job types.

Join Camille now as she further explores AI and its applications for you.


If you want to learn more about how to leverage your digital products or service visit:
www.camilleattell.com/remoteworkschool

You can also take her FREE training at:
www.camilleattell.com/remote-training

If you have suggestions for the show, you can contact Camille via Instagram: @camille.attell


 **DISCLAIMER: This podcast is not a substitute for professional consultation. For any retirement or income-related matters, it is best to work with a professional advisor.**
 
 Welcome to The Remote Work Retirement Show, the only show that is dedicated to remote work for semi-retirees, people leaving the workforce, and people working in retirement to help them have the peace of mind that they can live how they want without the fear of running out of money.

In episode 91, we explore how to use artificial intelligence to identify your top skills. You're listening to the remote work retirement show. I'm your host, Camille Attell. And this is the only show that helps semi retirees figure out the remote work options. I believe the remote work is the new retirement plan and that many retirees have both the ability and desire to work, how they want so they can live how they want. Let's dig into today's episode.... Hello, and welcome back. Thank you for joining me again today. It's always an honor. When you tune into the show, if this is your first time listening. No worries. There will be lots of really good information in this episode for you, even if you're just starting. However, if you do want to go back and catch a couple of episodes before this, it might help because I do set the tone for the topics that I'm covering this month. So first I talked about what's happening in the job market and what you can expect, how we're still seeing a pretty strong job market, how there are new opportunities being created. And then I talked about, should you really use AI to write your resume? There was an article that I explored, which I put that link in last week's episode, episode 90, that talked about how, not only is it a good idea to use AI for your resume, but HR managers and those who hire employees actually prefer it. And I talk about why that is in last week's episode. So I don't want to cover it all again, but I also left off in that episode talking about a couple of tools that I wanted to explore and then bring to you in today's episode, as well as next week's episode. So today I'm actually going to talk about how to use AI, to unlock your skills, to really identify the top skills that you have so that you can display those skills. On your resume on LinkedIn, maybe in a cover letter. And certainly when you're having an interview. The idea is that you can very quickly and very easily talk about your top. Say five to 10 skills. And that you really understand how to swap out your skills when needed for different job types. I talk in remote work school. That's my coaching program. I talk a lot to the members there about how it's really important that you're very nimble. With your resume and with your skills and LinkedIn and just your job searching in general. One of the ways to be nimble. Is is to have a nice, I guess I'll call it. Arsenal doesn't sound like the right word, honestly. So Cadray is that the right word? I don't know. I should stop using fancy words because they never sound right. But you should have a nice set. Of skills. That you can always pull from and use for different job types. For example. I can do a lot of different jobs. So can you, because you've probably had a lot of different jobs and you've built up a lot of different skills. Over the years and over probably the many jobs or careers that you've had. So I have a really big set of skills that I could pull from. If you go to my LinkedIn profile, which is my name, Camille Attell, you'll see about 50 different skills there. That I've listed, but I'm not going to list those same 50 skills on my resume. That would be really overwhelming. Nor am I going to talk about the same 50 skills? Uh, in, in a job interview or when I'm talking to a potential employer or client. So what I want to do is I want to be able to pluck the skills that are needed for each job or each client. And I'll give you an example. I have a whole set of skills around project management. I've done project management for many years, even though I'm not certified and I never went to school for it. So for those of you who are wondering. You know, do I need to go to school or I can't put that title in my resume because I never, I've never done that job. I say. You know, hogwash to that because. If you can do the job, then you can definitely talk about the skills. And I would argue you might even be able to put the title, but that's a conversation for another day, a title on your resume. I should say. But let's just talk about the skills of project management for a moment so I can organize projects. I can multitask. I can. Track resources I can anticipate bottlenecks and a project. I can make decisions, strategic decisions about a project. I have all of those skills in my skillset. However, if I'm going to apply. For a job in marketing, which is another. Skillset that I have. And another job I can do, I may not talk about the skillsets of project management. I may want to talk about a different set of skills that I have related to marketing. For example, I can write good marketing copy. I can do audience analysis. I know how to be persuasive in an ad. Do you see how I'm using a completely different set of skills? And the reason I'm able to roll all of that right off the tongue is because I've done so many different, I'll call them skills, inventories, and I'm so intimately aware of the skills that I have, that I know how to very quickly talk about them when I need to. Now the way that I got to that, I'm going to talk about that today because today's episode is how to use AI to identify your top skills. But before AI, let's talk about pre AI. The way that I got to this point was doing very manual skills inventories, and I think it's still worth. Sharing how to do that. In this episode, I will talk about the AI way to do it because it's certainly faster and it's a whole lot more fun. However, it doesn't hurt. To start by doing a manual skills inventory. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's, it gives you a really good grounding in who you are and what you're good at. And you're going to feel a lot more connected to the skills that you come up with than if you just hop on over to the AI tools, which might feel a little bit like disconnected for you. So let's start with the manual way to do it very quickly. And then I'll pivot over to the AI stuff. So one of the best ways you can crack open your skills. I like to say crack open your skills. Cause I think of it like an egg, you know, a lot of people talk to me about how they've done a lot of things in life, you know, oh, I did this and I did that and I did this job and I, I used to order the supplies and I, and I used to talk to the guys in manufacturing and we did it and they, they just give me like a laundry list of things they've done. And while they're talking to me, I think about like, okay, that's great. But how do we crack open the skills that are locked inside of the egg of stuff you just shared with me? And that's most people just get hung up on all the things they used to do and all the tasks they used to do in all the jobs they used to do, which is great. That's lovely. But then they're making me work to crack open the egg and I want them to crack open their own egg. Right. So the way we start that is we list out all the things they told me, all the things they've done. And related to each task they've done. We go deeper and we identify the skill that they need to do the task. I talked about this on other episodes. There's probably some titles you can scroll through where I talk about how to do skills inventories and things like that. If you want to take a deeper dive into this subject. But what we need to do is we need to talk more about the skill that you have and even the knowledge to some degree, to complete the task. So for example, the person who talked to me about ordering supplies and talking to manufacturing and figuring out the logistics. It's like, okay, let's take just one of those things. Okay. So you ordered supplies. What skills do you need to be able to order supplies effectively? Which sounds easy, but may not be. And then they go on to say, well, first I have to do an inventory of the supplies we already have. Okay, great. So you can conduct an inventory of supplies. That's a skill you're able to. Accurately determine how many supplies you have on hand and what's missing. How do you do that? Tell me, walk me through that. Do you walk to a closet? Do you count it? And they say, oh no, we have an ordering system. We have a supply system. Oh, so you use a software to do this well, yes. Okay. Tell me more about that. Okay. Well, in the software that I use, I have to make sure that every day I check in and then I can see the supplies that we have, I have to track an alert. And then if an alert comes up, then I have to double check and make sure that we're actually missing those supplies. And so I do a validation check. Oh. So you know how to validate in this system? Yes, I do. So, as you can see in this example, I'm reverse engineering. What that person told me. And I'm literally asking them to talk me through how they do it, because I can guarantee you that there are multiple steps in this process. And whenever there are multiple steps, you can also find multiple skills. And that's how we start to list out skills that you have literally on paper. We just list them out one by one. Now I'm not saying that's, that's the list you're going to use. And. And you'll use every single one of those skills because some of them are maybe more basic than others. But this is how we try to find. The golden skills, the yolk, the ones that are really worth sharing on your resume or on LinkedIn, the ones that are really applicable to the job that you will be applying to, or if you're going to start a business. The skills you want to talk about with your potential clients, right? So that's, that's a way to do it is to just think about all the things you do, either in your current job or your past job. Or maybe not even related to a job at all, maybe it's just in your daily life. I mean, In our daily lives. A lot of us do things like pay bills, online, log in to different platforms on the internet. Maybe we're making tough decisions for those of you who are caretakers, you're making challenging decisions related to the person that you're taking care of. Uh, maybe you're navigating through a really complex medical system. Maybe you're tracking medications that your loved one is taking or that you're taking, you know, if you're a caretaker for yourself, So I want you to think about that. You know, what are all the skills related to those things? That is a way to do a skills inventory, very manually. Another way to do it would be to take some skills inventories online, where you take. A short quiz or you take some sort of online assessment, you can just Google free skills inventories. And you'll, you'll find many, I don't want to recommend any right now because a lot of them are constantly changing and what used to be free might be paid now. And so, you know, I don't want to state what they, the ones I use here, because if you're listening to this in three months from now, it's probably changed. So just Google free skills inventories, and you'll come up with a variety of them. And those are great too, because you can take a little quiz and then you'll get an objective response about the skills that you have. So those are some manual ways to, to get to your skills. Now I want to talk about some really fun ways to do this using AI. And I'm going to talk about two different ways. I'm going to talk about using chat GPT or something similar. And then I'm going to talk about. One of the AI tools. It was listed in the article that I talked about in episode 90. Which would be using the Grammarly, AI skills, I guess, inventory. I don't know what they call it. When I get to that, I'll give you the official name because the article did talk about using Grammarly to identify your skills. And I, at the time hadn't used it, I have since used it. And I think it's interesting, but let's talk about how to use this or how to do this using chat GPT, which is free and very common. So there are a couple of ways to do this. Number one, if you already have a resume ready to. Go, even if it's old, I still think it's worth using because typically on resumes, people have their jobs listed. And what you can do is you can copy your resume, but leave off your name and your, any personal information, like your phone number or your email address, or your address, anything that's personal that you don't want to be fed into the giant machine of AI. Don't, don't put it on there. And if you feel like you want to take some of the names of the places you worked off. That doesn't hurt either. Um, th there's no harm in it, but some people just want to keep their information really private. So I leave that up to you. So, what you can do is you can copy your resume. Just click and copy all the guts of the resume. Then you can go over to chat GPT and you can use this prompt. This is a prompt is what you type into the field. You can use a prompt that says something like in a moment, I'm going to paste my resume here for you to review. I'd like you to identify my top 10 to 20 skills. That you can find in my resume. Now you may already have a skills section on your resume, and maybe those are the skills that you've identified. So, what you could do is you could add an extra sentence in the prompt that says, please do not use the skills I've already listed in my skill section. Please find additional skills. I have not identified. And by doing that, what you'll do is you'll get chat GPT to come up with more skills than the ones you're already aware of. Now you don't have to do that. You could just leave it a little more broad because you know, it doesn't hurt for chat GPT to validate the skills you've already listed. But if you're trying to come up with a bigger list so that you have more to work with, you could tell chat GPT to disregard the skills you've listed in the skills section of your resume. If you have one and not everybody has one, if you have one, you know what I'm talking about, right? Some people call it summary qualifications, or. Uh, skills, et cetera. Now what's going to happen. Is that chatty PT or the AI of your choice is going to spit back out a list of skills. And if you've never done this before, you're going to be amazed. It's going to feel like magic. It's so fun. Every time I do this inside of remote work school with somebody. Because everyone goes, Ooh. Ah, we all get really excited because it's like, imagine if. Instead of staring at a blank sheet of paper and trying to come up with your own set of skills, it might take you hours, days, or for some of you, you never start because it feels overwhelming. Imagine being able to do that in literally seconds. It just makes it go so much faster. Some people feel like it's cheating, but it's not cheating because you're literally feeding your resume. And you're just asking AI to help you do this. It's no different than sitting down with a friend. And showing them your resume and saying, can you help me figure out my list of skills? Is asking your friend for help cheating? No, it isn't. So the AI acts like your friend, except it's better because it it's a machine. And it's objective, right. Where are you as your friend may not be objective. So, you know, it's a fun way to do it. Now. I want to give you another way to do this. That is a little more sophisticated. But it is worth you knowing how to do. And that is before you feed your resume into chat, GPT, take a job description that you like, that you want to apply to, or maybe one that you want to apply to in the future. But maybe the one you're using right now, isn't the perfect job, but it's a good starting point. Take the job description. Copy that. And go over to chatty PT and say something like this is a prompt you could use. In a moment I'm going to copy and paste a job description for a job that I'd like to apply to. And I'd like you to identify the top skills of this job. And that would be step one. So feed the job description in there. Put that prompt in there. And then it'll, it'll tell you the skills then in the same thread, you want to keep this all in the same thread. Then you can say thank you so much. Cause I like to thank my AI. Next, I'm going to paste my resume in here. And I would like you to find the top skills that I have that relate to the job I just gave you because I want to make the skills aligned. And then you put your resume in and it's going to find the skills in your resume that should align to the job that you just fed into AI. And that's a way to really narrow down your skills. To make sure that the list of skills that you put on your resume. Align with the job that you're applying to, because that's the most important thing that you can do with your skills. It doesn't help you. If you have skills. That you put on your resume that don't relate to the job that you're applying to. I mean, if you're applying for, let's say a virtual assistant job that has a lot of administrative skills related, it doesn't help. If you're going to put skills, like you worked in a laboratory, right. Or you're a musician. I mean, that's lovely. I mean, we love that you have those talents, but if they're not related to the job you're applying to. It literally doesn't matter. We don't care. I mean, I hate to say it that way, but I, I think one of the biggest mistakes people make on a resume is a list of bunch of skills or experience. That is unrelated to the job they're applying to. So by doing the prompts the way I just explained. You can make sure that the skills that you have on your resume are very much aligned. Okay. So that's a way to use AI. To, um, crack open your skills. Now the last one I'm going to talk about is this Grammarly tool. That helps you identify your skills. So the official title for this is called the AI resumes skills generator. And if I put the word Grammarly in front of it, it's just a very long thing. That's why I couldn't remember what it was called. So I'll put a link to this in the show notes, but you could also Google it and just Google Grammarly skills, something like that. And what it is is it's you. So let me back up. Grammarly is a really cool tool that helps you write better. There is a free version of it. If you want to experiment with it. Everyone in remote work school absolutely loves this tool. We use it all the time to improve our writing skills. To run our resumes through it. So it can check for grammar and punctuation. You can use it for cover letters. You can use it for all kinds of different things, but that's just what we use it for. And they've added this new feature called the AI resume skills generator. Now here's what I don't totally know. I think it's free, but I think it's free up to a certain point and I can't quite figure out. At what point they try to kick in the pricing, but here's what I was able to do with it. If you go to the Grammarly, um, skills, what the heck? AI resume skills generator. My goodness. It's very easy to use because the first page has step one. And all you need to do is you need to enter the job title of the job you're applying to, or a job you're interested in. I always tell people, maybe you don't start with the job. You actually want to apply to start with something similar. Because you want to get some practice before you dive right into the real thing, but it's really cool because you can enter a job title. For example, when you go to the page, it's going to say math teacher. I actually chose the title project coordinator because we get a lot of folks in remote work school that have a lot of those types of skills, project coordinator, project manager. People who worked in logistics, even virtual assistants who have to manage a lot of tasks, et cetera. So you just type the title in. And then there's a button that says create resume skill section and you just click the button. And it's just going to spit out a whole bunch of skills. Now it's interesting because it's not, I wouldn't say that this is a way that you can reverse engineer your own skills. Like I talked about with the option of doing a manual skills inventory or doing a skills inventory with chat GPT. Um, but I do think that it's helpful because let's say you come up with a list of skills on your own. And you're just looking for more. So this is a great way to just look for more skills. So for example, when I put in project coordinator just now, It spit out a bunch of skills like project management, and then it gives you a sentence, which the sentence can be helpful because then you can use that for your resume as well. So for example, this first one says project management experienced in managing projects from conception to completion. Including budgeting, scheduling and resource allocation. That's pretty cool. It goes into things like communication, organization, problem solving, team player, technical, proficiency, adaptability, et cetera. So on. And then I have sentences for each one of those, which I don't want to read to you. So you could use this. I wouldn't copy this directly because it is AI. And I always tell people don't use AI. As is you just want to use it like a friend or a thought partner to, just to help you get those juices flowing. So you can, you know, pluck things off of this and weave it into your resume. So here's what I'm noticing with this AI resume skills generator. It gives you that very easy. Um, you know, click a button and it comes up with this list, but then it goes on to try to get you to use some of their other features. That's where I think maybe it's, it's, it's free up to a certain point and then it wants you to pay, to get some of these other, um, features, but it doesn't hurt to use it. Um, because then at the bottom it also gives you some cool stuff, like frequently asked questions about skills. And that's helpful too, because it can help guide you what to do with these skills. And then it has some other cool things. Like how do you, you know, how to use Grammarly to write a cover letter? What are some things you want to include in your resume? So on and so forth. So I think it's a really good basic tool. Like I mentioned, in last week's episode, they talked about it in that, um, in that Forbes article. And I think if you're, if you just want to play around with it and get started, I think it can be helpful. But I think just using chatty PT alone could also be really helpful. And I think I forgot to mention to you another way to use chat GPT. If you don't have a resume is to take all of the tasks that you came up with in the manual way that I talked about. And just feed those tasks into chat GPT or the AI of your choice and ask it to tell you what your top skills are. So I want to end with this. The idea here is to come up with a very robust set of skills that you always have available to you, that you can mix and match that you can interchange whenever you're applying to different jobs, because let's face it. You are not a monolithic person. Oh, there's another big, fancy word that I shouldn't use. And I shouldn't use it, not for your sake, but for mine, because sometimes I use these words and I'm like, is that even the right word? Um, What I'm trying to say is you're not a one dimensional person who only knows how to do one thing. You're a really diverse person who has a lot of skills and a lot of experience and a lot of talent. In fact, sometimes that's the problem. How do you get someone with so much experience like you have. Into a set of skills. I mean, sometimes you have too many skills and sometimes for whatever reason, you can only think of three. And so all of these activities are to help you come up with the robust set of skills that you need, that you can always work from. And you'll always know what they are. So that you can always use them in the right places. And when people ask you a question, like, what are your top skills? You just know them off the top of your head. All right. I hope you found this episode helpful. I hope that using AI helps you join me next week. We'll be using more AI tools to do things like write your resume and who knows? Maybe some other bonuses. All right, thanks so much. See you next time. If you're looking to get back into the workforce, change jobs, work remotely, or learn artificial intelligence, check out my free remote work training so you can get ahead of the trends and stay ahead of the pack. Click the link in the show notes, or go to www.camilahealth.com and press the free training button.