Google's 'Career Dreamer' Claims It Can Help You Find a Job to Match Your Skills
Artificial intelligence may be threatening to take your job, but the tech can also help you find a new one, Google thinks: It's just rolled out a new AI-powered tool called "Career Dreamer," which leverages AI algorithms to help you identify roles that are suited to your skills and experience.
Google says it's worked with groups including students, recent graduates, adult learners seeking a career change, and veterans to help develop the tool. It's part of the wider "Grow with Google" portal, which offers a variety of tools and guides for job seekers and businesses—many of which involve some form of AI.
This isn't a full end-to-end job application app, but rather a way of exploring jobs that you'd do well at—and which you might not otherwise have thought of. In the announcement blog post, Grow with Google's Lisa Gevelber points to a stat from the World Economic Forum: Workers now hold an average of 12 different jobs across their lifetime, and that number's growing.
"The less traditional your career path is, the harder it can be to frame your previous experiences into one cohesive narrative, or to understand what careers align with your particular skills and strengths," writes Gevelber.
Career Dreamer is able to "connect the dots" for you, and you don't need to invest much time or effort—just tell the tool a bit about your expertise, past work, and interests. From there, you can switch to Gemini to take the next steps, like working on a cover letter. You can try Career Dreamer for free here.
How to use Career Dreamer
Click the Start button, and the first prompt asks you to share a current or previous role.
As you work through the various screens that help Career Dreamer learn a little bit about you, you'll be asked about the specific tasks you've done and the skills you've learned along the way—so researched technology trends and written articles, would be two examples from my own career.
Eventually you get to a Career Identity Statement, which sums up your career journey so far—from here you can add more previous roles and existing skills, your education history, and any additional (work-related) interests. You can keep regenerating your Career Identity Statement as you go, though it tends to always sound rather generic (and like something you'd see a lot of on Linkedin).
Switch to the Explore Paths tab, and you get a chart of roles you might be interested in—some pulled from recruitment databases, and others thought up by AI. You can click on any of the results for more information about the job, and narrow down the selection based on your experiences, education, skills, and interests.
As AI might soon be able to do the job of telling you how to manage your Windows notifications or how good the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold is, I thought I'd spin up Career Dreamer myself and see if there were any alternative career paths I could take outside of tech journalism.
I didn't find the suggestions all that inspiring; it was just the usual obvious alternatives to tech journalism—public relations, technical writing, web developing, editing—but your mileage may vary. Everything is wrapped up in a slick interface and is easy to use, even if the end results are rather generic.
The tool gives you the option to Jump to Gemini, where you can start exploring more about potential roles, brush up your resume, and explore different paths for your career. There's no way to log into Career Dreamer, but the site should remember your previous session by identifying your browser and device, if you leave and come back.