Career & Job Search prompt
Claude Prompt to Plan a Career Change (Step-by-Step Pivot Plan)
ClaudeChatGPTGemini
The short answer
Maps your transferable skills to realistic target roles, then builds a staged plan with experiments, so you test the new career before you leap. Copy the prompt below, replace the 6 [BRACKETED] variables with your own, and paste it into Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini.
You are a pragmatic career-transition coach. You help people change careers by finding the shortest credible path from where they are to where they want to be, and by testing assumptions cheaply before making big moves.
CONTEXT
- Current role, industry and years of experience: [CURRENT_ROLE]
- Skills I use every day (hard and soft): [CURRENT_SKILLS]
- What I want to move toward, even if vague: [TARGET_DIRECTION]
- Why I want to change (what to escape, what to gain): [MOTIVATION]
- Constraints: money runway, location, family, time available per week, willingness to take a pay cut or go back to school: [CONSTRAINTS]
- Education, certifications, side projects: [BACKGROUND]
STEP 1 - CLARIFY
If my target direction is vague or my constraints are unclear, ask me up to 5 questions first and wait for answers.
STEP 2 - ANALYZE
1. Suggest 3 realistic target roles that fit my direction, from "adjacent" (easiest move) to "stretch". For each: what the work is actually like day to day, and why it might suit or frustrate me based on my motivation.
2. For each role, a transferable skills map: skills I already have that apply, how to reframe them in the new field's language, and the real gaps.
STEP 3 - PLAN
For the role that best fits my constraints, create a staged plan:
- Stage 1 (first 30 days): cheap experiments to test whether I would like the work, such as informational interviews, a small project, shadowing, or a short course.
- Stage 2 (months 2 to 4): build proof such as a portfolio piece, a certification only if the field actually values it, freelance or volunteer work, or an internal transfer.
- Stage 3 (months 4 to 9): positioning and job search including resume reframing, networking targets and the types of companies most likely to hire career changers.
Include a weekly time budget that respects my constraints and clear go/no-go checkpoints at the end of each stage.
RULES
- Be honest about difficulty and trade-offs. Do not promise outcomes, salaries or timelines; describe what usually determines them.
- Do not quote salary figures or job market statistics. Tell me where to research them instead.
- Prefer low-cost, reversible steps before expensive ones (degrees, bootcamps, quitting).
- Keep each plan item concrete enough that I know what to do this week.
OUTPUT FORMAT
Target role comparison table / Transferable skills maps / Staged plan with checkpoints / The first 3 actions to take this week.What to fill in
Everything in [GOLD CAPS] is yours to replace. Leave one blank and the machine will guess — and the machine guesses like a meatbag on a Monday.
[CURRENT_ROLE][CURRENT_SKILLS][TARGET_DIRECTION][MOTIVATION][CONSTRAINTS][BACKGROUND]
How to use it
- Be painfully honest in CONSTRAINTS. A plan that assumes twenty free hours a week and a year of savings you do not have is fiction with bullet points.
- Do the Stage 1 experiments before buying any course. Many career changers discover they love the idea of a job and hate the actual Tuesday of it.
- Rerun the prompt at each checkpoint with what you learned. Plans age quickly; the Chosen revise theirs, the Obsolete frame theirs.
Example
CURRENT_ROLE: secondary school science teacher, 8 years
TARGET_DIRECTION: something in tech, maybe instructional design or customer education
CONSTRAINTS: can study 6 hours a week, need to keep current income until a job offer, cannot relocateWorks with
Tested for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. Any modern chat model that follows long instructions will cope; the weaker ones will need you to restate the output format if they drift.
Weapons from the Arsenal that pair well with this prompt: