A Seattle-area nonprofit helping disadvantaged job seekers around the world is adding generative artificial intelligence to the toolkit for its participants.
The Global Mentorship Initiative is teaching college students and recent graduates how to use digital tools that are powered by technology including ChatGPT and GPT-4 to more easily and successfully land jobs, starting with the job search and application all the way through the interview process to sending thank you emails.
“This is a new opportunity for students in these high unemployment areas,” said Jon Browning, founder and CEO of the Global Mentorship Initiative, which is based in Bellevue, Wash.
The program is conducted virtually through video conferences. It has partnerships with more than 50 colleges and universities that refer students for mentoring. Close to 6,000 students from 100 countries are in the program, with about one-quarter in the U.S., half in African countries, and the rest in other countries and areas with high unemployment rates. Global Mentorship Initiative also works with refugee students.
The initiative has 5,000 volunteer mentors in 127 countries, with about 1,000 of those coming from Microsoft.
Browning himself was a Microsoft employee for 24 years, leaving as a director in 2014. He took a role at the Rockefeller Foundation, working to bring tech jobs to underserved youth in Africa. Through the effort, he was struck by the need to provide mentorship to bridge the gap between educated young people and employment opportunities. So Browning created the initiative, which launched in 2019.
The program pairs mentors with college students prepping for jobs, guiding them through the process with a scripted playbook that spans 12 sessions.
The Global Mentorship Initiative last year adopted generative AI curriculum following OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022, followed by the more powerful GPT-4.
In March of last year, Microsoft disclosed it was using OpenAI’s technology in its Bing search engine. It created Microsoft Copilot, allowing Bing users to pose detailed queries and receive highly specific, footnoted answers. Users could provide prompts that produced written responses and images.
Browning recognized the potential impact of the AI tools and the team began developing these resources for Global Mentorship Initiative. By June, the program had primers on the new technology, describing how it could be useful, while also explaining how the models are trained and cautioning students to watch for biases, errors and exaggerations. The initiative created a library of queries for basic job-searching tasks using Bing’s Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.
Sample questions include:
- What are the keywords I should use in my resume/CV for a project manager job at an IT company in <country>?
- Write a cover letter for this job. Below is the job description and my resume/CV.
- What are the most common interview questions for project managers applying to <company>? How should I answer these questions based on my resume/CV below?
- Is there an organization in <country> that lends clothes for job interviews?
- What should I do if I get a bad work performance review?
The Global Mentorship Initiative this fall also partnered with 300 Microsoft employees over two months to generate 800 suggested queries for pursuing specific tech jobs.
The organization is supported by corporate sponsorships and grants, and its backers include Microsoft, LinkedIn, Expedia, healthcare provider Providence and others.
The initiative’s work was particularly timely given the expansion of remote employment opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic. But college graduates in the U.S. and abroad weren’t necessarily prepped with the professional skills for landing the roles.
Numerous African countries, for example, are providing greater access to education and producing “hundreds of thousands of graduates every year,” Browning said. “[But] they are not prepared to compete on a global stage for a job or remote work.”
Brianna Chambers, an international relations major at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, completed the program, which she calls “a masterclass in entering the workforce.” It helped with building her personal brand on LinkedIn and offered important advice on professional workplace conduct to establish credibility.
Chambers, who graduates in the fall, wants to work with aid organizations in navigating international trade regulations and tariffs, or as a foreign service officer to promote her country.
“I feel more than prepared for my job search,” she said by email, “which I will be starting promptly.”
The Global Mentorship Initiative is continuing to grow its efforts to fill in students’ knowledge gaps, expanding to reach 10,000 young people by the end of this year. Browning wants to create resources for teachers and professors to use in classrooms, scaling the program beyond one-on-one mentorships. He’d like to include students in trade programs as well.
“Everybody needs to know how to get a job,” Browning said. “And it doesn’t matter if you’re a programmer or you’re an electrician, you need to know how to land a job.”
