You have no idea.
I mean that literally.
You have no idea what the job you’re applying for actually exists to accomplish. And I think that is making your career change much harder than it needs to be.
(Okay... maybe not you personally, but a ton of career changers, for sure.)
I spend a LOT of time looking at job postings. Probably more than any normal person should. And lately, I keep noticing the same thing:
People are trying to learn AI before they really understand the job they want.
I get why.
AI is everywhere.
Every other post is basically screaming:
Learn this tool! Master this prompt! Take this AI course! Do it now or risk becoming professionally irrelevant!
But before you ask, “What AI skills do I need?”
I want you to answer a much less exciting question:
What is this person actually getting paid to do?
The Challenge We're Solving Today
Job postings have a special talent for making fairly normal work sound extremely complicated.
You will see phrases like:
- drive adoption
- manage implementations
- support stakeholders
- enable users
- lead change
And if you are coming from education, your brain may immediately go:
Nope. Never done that. Next.
Except... maybe you have. You just didn't call it that.
Why This Matters to You
I looked at tons of roles in Training, Customer Success, and Implementation, all posted within 7 days of me writing this newsletter.
Different titles. Different companies. Different departments.
But a lot of the work boiled down to the same thing:
Help people successfully use something new.
That is it.
An Implementation Specialist might configure a platform, train users, solve problems, manage a rollout, and coordinate with a bunch of people.
That sounds very corporate.
Here is the normal-person translation:
Get the customer successfully using the product.
Now I want you to think about your own experience.
Did your school roll out a new LMS and somehow you became the unofficial help desk?
Did you help coworkers learn a new system?
Did you introduce a new process and then spend the next three weeks answering, “Wait, where do I click?”
Did you train people, troubleshoot problems, adjust what was not working, and help everyone actually use the thing?
That counts for something.
And you may be overlooking it because nobody at your school ever said:
“Congratulations. You are now driving adoption.”
Common Solutions and Why They Might Not Work
Here is where I see people make this harder than it needs to be.
They spot AI in a job posting and immediately think:
What course should I take?
What certification do I need?
What software should I learn?
Should I put ChatGPT on my resume?
Should I know five AI tools?
Should I know ten?
Meanwhile, we have skipped one tiny detail:
Do you actually understand the job?
Because if you don't, you have no idea which skills matter.
You can spend weeks learning something because it feels productive just to realize that the role you want barely uses it.
More learning is not always the answer. Sometimes you need to get clearer first.
A Better Approach for You
I want you to try something very simple.
Open one job posting for a role you are seriously considering.
Then ignore the corporate language for a minute and finish this sentence:
They are paying this person to __________.
That is your job.
If you are looking at Implementation:
They are paying this person to get the customer successfully using the product.
Customer Success:
They are paying this person to help customers get value from the product and keep using it.
Training or Enablement:
They are paying this person to help employees learn and use something effectively.
See how much easier that is to think about?
Now ask yourself:
Have I ever helped make something like that happen?
That is where I want you starting.
Not with:
“What AI course should I take?”
Start with:
“What is the actual work?”
Then ask:
How is AI changing this work?
Now you have context.
Now you can figure out what you actually need to learn instead of collecting random skills and wasting your time.
TL;DR
- Learn the job before you learn the AI.
- Job postings often make simple outcomes sound much more complicated than they are.
- Translate the role into one plain-English sentence.
- Then look for where your experience already overlaps.
- After that, figure out how AI is changing the role (and yes, you can use AI to help you summarize the changes)
Your Next Steps
I am giving you one thing to do.
Find one job posting you are interested in.
Then write:
They are paying this person to __________.
One sentence.
That is all.
If you can answer it clearly, the job will probably start making a lot more sense.
If you can't, keep studying the role before you spend money or time trying to “upskill.”
You don't need another AI course yet.
You need to truly understand what you are aiming at.
P.s.
If your bigger problem is, “Steph, I do not even know which job I should be looking at,” start there.
Take my FREE What’s Next? Career Quiz to narrow down the corporate career paths that may make sense for your experience.
Take the What’s Next? Career Quiz →
And if you are ready for a more structured path through your career change, you can learn more about the Elevated Careers Career Change Accelerator.
Learn more about the Career Change Accelerator
See you next Saturday,
Steph
Steph Yesil
Find me on LinkedIn, Get My Career Change Kit,
Book a 60-Min Strategy Call
