An AI Career Coach is Leveling the Playing Field for Job Seekers

The transition from school to a career is fraught with challenges that hinder students from entering the workforce.

Studies show that the majority of graduates in the United States feel unprepared to make critical decisions about their education and careers after leaving high school, have no defined educational or career path when they graduate, and feel unprepared for such life-altering decisions.

What’s more, in the United States, the average ratio of students to school counselors is 350:1, they are overworked and unevenly distributed.

“It's extraordinarily rare for a young person, to have access to a counselor or an advisor or a career coach," said Jared Chung, founder of CareerVillage. "Often, they're entering the labor market for the first time without having had any kind of coaching about how they should be applying, or how to prepare for an interview, what to wear for the kind of job they’re trying to get into, and how to leverage their network. It disproportionately affects people who already are facing a lot of inequities."

CareerVillage, a nonprofit with over 13 years of experience in providing career advice, just launched a solution to address these inequities. Its new tool Coach, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), is democratizing how people navigate their career paths, especially youth who lack access to traditional career support systems.

The need for such a tool is even more pressing in the face of rapid changes in the labor market due to AI. "We all have to be really good at navigating the labor market even more so now because of how quickly the market is changing,” Chung said. 

Coach offers services that range from helping users find internships to assisting with resume writing and conducting mock interviews. What sets it apart is its ability to provide personalized, step-by-step guidance based on real career coaching practices.

"We've designed all these activities based upon the real things that real career coaches do with their clients and based upon the best practices and pedagogy that they use," Chung said.

Developing the tool was a collaborative effort involving a coalition of 20 organizations, including experts in various communities, specific subject areas, bias and AI. This diverse input helped ensure the tool's quality, consistency and reliability.

One of the most significant advantages of Coach is its accessibility. It's free for anyone to use, available 24/7 and can communicate in multiple languages. "If anybody is getting ready to enter the labor market or trying to plan for their future, then 100 percent free, unlimited access to world-class career coaching is available," Chung said.

Launched in August 2024, the tool has over 4,700 users across 15 partners in over 70 countries and 10 languages.

"Foundations and donations pay for the public to be able to access Coach for free," Chung said, ensuring that individual job seekers can use the tool without cost barriers. 

The impact is already visible. Chung shared the story of a 22-year-old recent immigrant to the United States who used Coach to navigate the unfamiliar U.S. education system. Within weeks, she enrolled in a community college program aligned with her goal to become a chemical engineer — a path she might have struggled to find on her own.

For educational institutions and job training programs that want to integrate Coach into their services, CareerVillage adopted a cost-sharing model. "When we work with an educational institution or a job training program, we share the cost," Chung said. 

AI technology can be expensive to develop and maintain, but it’s a no-brainer investment, Chung said. "We're giving people access to personalized, year-round career coaching for a few bucks a year," he said, emphasizing the high return on investment for society in helping people navigate the job market effectively. 

The organization’s dual funding approach — philanthropic support for public access and cost-sharing with institutions — will make Coach both widely accessible and financially sustainable in the long term.

The use of AI in career coaching also raises questions about potential biases, so CareerVillage took proactive steps to address these concerns. "If you can identify bias, then you can work it out," Chung said. "I actually think it's far harder to get bias out of a person than it is to get it out of an AI system."

The team implemented monitoring systems to ensure Coach meets their standards, with the aim to detect and correct any issues before they impact users. "Our goal is that we know first and can take action if needed before somebody even has to tell us," Chung said.

The idea for Coach emerged from CareerVillage's long-standing, micro-mentoring program, which has connected young people with over 150,000 volunteers answering career questions online. Despite that program's success in serving millions across 150 countries, Chung and his team found themselves constantly having to decline requests for more comprehensive services like internship matching, resume help and mock interviews, Chung said. 

The advent of generative AI technology in late 2022 made them realize that they could easily expand their scope of services. The journey began with a simple experiment in a San Jose library, where Chung tested an early AI chatbot with a teenager seeking career advice. 

"It was incredibly obvious that, although you couldn't do everything at that early stage, there was a lot of the stuff that a young person needed," Chung said. This initial success led to the development of a small demo version, created by just five staff members over 10 weeks, which then evolved into the full-fledged Coach tool available today. 

For CareerVillage, the success of Coach isn't simply about user numbers or engagement metrics. "We don't actually care about usage in and of itself," Chung said. 

Instead, the focus is on tangible outcomes that benefit job seekers. "What we care about is our learners and job seekers being confident going into their job search, and we care about whether they get the jobs that actually allow them to thrive" he said. 

To track these outcomes, CareerVillage is implementing follow-up mechanisms. "There's a moment that we're working toward, or we're building, when Coach reaches out to you and says, 'How did it go? Did that interview go well? Do you need help? Did you get an offer?’” Chung said. This approach will allow the organization to celebrate successes with users and provide additional support where needed. 

For institutional partners, success is measured by improvements in job placement rates for program graduates. And as Coach evolves, CareerVillage hopes to gather and share insights to inform broader efforts to support career development, but protecting user privacy remains a top priority, Chung said.

"Where we learn about the kinds of activities that people most benefit from on the path to reaching their career goals, we do hope to share those insights broadly so that everybody in the sector, or just everybody in society, can be involved in making sure that everybody navigates their way to thriving occupation.”