Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep164: Will you lose your job to ChatGPT?

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

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Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hey, welcome back to the Corporate Survivor Podcast. Today, let's talk about chat GPT and the future of AI and what does that actually mean for you if you are working in a 9-5 job.

So let's dive in. If you have been spending a lot of time online, I'm sure you have come across the chat GPT tool. And particularly on platforms on LinkedIn, the conversation around whether chat GPT will eventually replace jobs and basically whether AI will take over your job or not has been a big topic for some time already. So last week when I was honored the LinkedIn top voice, this is a pretty common question that I got asked to say, hey, Mei-Ping, what do you think the future of artificial intelligence is going to be? And does it mean I am going to lose my job? Now, that's a very fair

question. You are actually thinking about your future career right now, and that's a good thing. Now, here's my opinion being someone who has actually achieved leadership positions in global multinational companies. I've worked in small companies. I've worked in big companies. I've also worked with clients from all over the world. My view is this. I like to see AI, technology, chat GPT, whichever tool you want to call it. You need to look at it from a perspective of how can I use this tool to make me more efficient? Not necessarily more effective. If you don't know what you're doing, then you probably won't be effective. But let me tell you the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. Maybe let's start with efficiency. Now, efficiency is doing something fast.

And effectiveness is doing the right thing. Now, how you can use ChatGPT as a corporate professional or a job seeker is you can use ChatGPT as a research tool, right? You can ask questions, get some ideas on maybe some of the things that, some of the jobs that you may want to explore, some of the ways that maybe you could write your email. And these are just some of the typical options that people are using ChatGPT for. Now, having played around the tool for some time, I will tell you this.

Now, the quality of the answers that you get through ChatGPT as a tool is highly reliant on the quality of questions that you ask. So in shorter terms, it means that rubbish in, rubbish out. Meaning if you ask a poor question, a lousy question, a question that doesn't have much context, you are probably not going to get the best answer that you can. And all these actually turn to the foundational human skill, which is communication skill, right? And further on to that is critical thinking skill, because you first need to know what to ask and how to ask the question.

The people have come to me saying, hey, Mipin, you know, I've started playing around with ChatGPT. I think it's a very powerful tool, but I don't feel I'm maximizing it. Yeah, that's because you don't know the right question to ask. And I will also tell you this, that ChatGPT pretty much is a search engine, for lack of a better word. So what that means is that it scours through the information online, right, particularly on Google and so forth, and depending on whatever questions that you ask, that it kind of pulls you a bit of a database based on what is already found out there, right? And think about

it. It's a generic encyclopedia of information. That's kind of how I see it. So the real question that you need to ask is, how is it relevant? And are these answers not curated for you, but pulled in by the algorithm actually suitable for you as someone who is working in a nine-to-five job, working in a corporate, working in an organization, facing challenges to navigate your workplace, people problems, as well as the corporate world. Because that's something that you may actually want to learn from someone who has actually been there versus waiting for this technology tool to tell you what to do. Because as I said earlier, I played around it a little bit and I asked a couple of questions. I said, okay, how do I grow my career? Okay, then I got a bunch of generic answers. I was like, okay,

then, but it was nothing tangible, right? No like clear strategy or anything. Then the second question I then asked is, can you give me some practical steps that I can do to grow my career? So I got like a bunch of answers such as, oh, you need to improve your networking skills, you need to improve your communication skills, blah, blah, blah. So basically stuff that you will probably get in a Google search, right? So when I looked at it, I'm like, okay, great. It sounds great. It sounds like a great tool. But as I said, right, is this actually backed by experience? And are you actually learning from a real person?

Because navigating the corporate world is not like the easiest thing. And as I always say, if you want to gain confidence that you really need to improve on your skills, at the best is you learn from somebody who has actually been there. Now, back to what I was talking about earlier

on, you know, efficiency versus effectiveness. You know, as I said, chat GPT, technology, you know, it doesn't to be chat GPT, can be any tool, whatever, helps you to get something done faster. But if you're relying on it 100% without knowing exactly what you're asking and what you're supposed to be looking at in terms of the, you know, answers that is churning out to you, then you will not meet the most important criteria for career success or work performance success, and that is effectiveness. Effectiveness is basically doing the right thing.

You can do the wrong thing fast, not a great thing, right? But you also want to do, you want to make sure that you're doing the right thing. And that's why, you know, I allude back to what I was saying earlier about making sure that you are applying the right strategy or taking the right steps in accordance to your current situation. And you can definitely use ChatGPT as a tool to help you elevate and work faster, right? Or maybe at least give you a bit of an idea so that you can validate it.

Now, the validation still comes from you and that's human skills, that's your corporate world knowledge, that's your understanding of your role, the ability for you to communicate and so forth. None of this sits away from what we've been talking about on this podcast, which is how do you learn to grow your career confidence and competence so they can grow your career in the corporate world?

Doesn't stay away from that. But how you think about chat GPT and the future of AI and technology is going to change or rather is going to influence the way your mindset towards thinking about it, right? You can think about it as something that is very fearful to say, hey, chat GPT is going to take over my job. Like what the heck am I supposed to do? Now that's a very fearful mindset,

probably not great for you. But then again, right? If chat GPT is just one tool, like just if you look at like the trajectory of technology for the past 20, 30 years, like so much has actually changed. So we have evolved, right? I mean, you're still in a career, right?

You still have a career. You still can look for opportunities because one thing people forget is that, yes, technology moves very quickly, but industries, the job market also picks up as well. So your role, if you really want to, you know, survive and like recession-proof yourself and like future-proof yourself, the job market also picks up as well. So your role, if you really want to survive and recession-proof yourself and future-proof yourself,

is to learn how to use this technology, use this AI to help you work faster. Now, I say work faster, I didn't say work better because, again, it's the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. So think about ChatGPT as just as any other technology tool that makes your life easier. Like for example, right, you probably have a phone, right? You can access social media, you can go on Google search, Bing search or whatever. And yeah, to me, chat GPT is

just the same. And similarly to any other future AI tools that will come up, like any other technological tool is supposed to make our work a bit easier, a bit faster, but at the end of the day, it's still down to you. And I will say that even till now, right, looking at the rise of ChatGPT, even hearing all this chitty chatter, in my view, this is just noise. This is just noise because at the end of the day, if you follow the three-step framework that I teach in my program, The Corporate Survivor, which is step one, get clear on the corporate world, understanding exactly how to operate in an organization,

because guess what? Chat GPT or not, organizations are still going to exist, right? Corporate careers are still going to exist. So step one, understand the corporate world, aligning your expectations, understanding people, like these skills are not going away. Then after that phase two, you need to assess your skills gap and start enhancing your top 12 corporate skills So top 12 corporate skills, I usually talk about it in four categories, which is category one communication Category two relationship building category three critical thinking category for productivity Now these top 12 skills in these four groups is something that I talk about a little bit more in my free training webinar If that's something that you want to do you can find more information to sign up for free in the

link in description below. But my point is that the human skills, the transferable soft skills are the things that will continue to make you a valuable professional, allowing you to work in any industry, any company, any role, regardless of whatever technology revolution that we're thinking of. So I hope that this episode gives you a bit of an idea on how you can better leverage AI versus fearing it and having a embracing and growth mindset on how we can, you know, survive and rather live together with technology just like we have done in the past 20 years. Because at the end of the day, if you're a valuable corporate professional,

then companies still want to hire you because guess who needs to operate the AI? Humans and particularly valuable professionals. So what you need to do and what you actually need to focus on is to improve your soft skills so that you can basically deliver work, deliver quality, and be somebody that humans,

people actually want to work with because that is something that AI, technology, chat, GPT, whatever that is, is not going to replace. And that's actually being human. That's actually having human skills. And that's actually learning

how to be a valid professional. So I hope that you found this episode insightful. I hope that it triggers some thoughts on your end on how you've been thinking about your career so far and how you can better leverage technology and AI in your day-to-day work so that you can eventually build more value, build more skills, that you get headhunted with better opportunities, you climb the career ladder with as little obstacles as possible. So you have learned something from today's episode.

Leave a comment, drop me a DM on LinkedIn and Instagram and let me know. And in the meantime, I hope you enjoy the rest of the episodes. And if you want to check out the free training webinar that I talked about earlier,

you can head on to www.gruercorporecareer.com or you can click on the description below. So with that, I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.