AI is already giving careers advice – we’re playing catch-up

Nearly a fifth of UK students and graduates have now used ChatGPT or Copilot as a source of careers advice, according to the Prospects Early Careers Survey. Among 13-to-16-year-olds, two-thirds told the BBC last month they’d use AI to help them get a job. That shift is happening faster than the sector’s response to it.

It is easy to see the appeal of AI. Chatbots are available and convenient. There is no waiting two weeks for an appointment and no struggling to find a time that fits with study, work and family commitments, no travel time or missed calls. AI can read your CV (or help you write one), map your skills and start suggesting career paths in minutes.

It’s also, oddly, rated as more empathetic than humans. A meta-analysis led by the Universities of Nottingham and Leicester found that in healthcare settings, chatbots had a roughly 73 per cent probability of being judged more empathetic than a human clinician. Telling a chatbot you don’t know what you’re doing with your life is a lot less exposing than telling a careers adviser, and the chatbot will respond warmly every time.

Then there’s the labour market. Parents are still young people’s most common source of careers advice but most of them are working from experience of a job market that barely resembles the one their children are entering. New roles and pathways are being created as old ones disappear. Job titles, their meanings and the skills required are evolving. Application processes are being rewritten. New government support schemes are encouraging but also add another layer of complexity. No human can hold all of that in their head. With the right context and guidance AI, in principle, can. And even when they can’t, a student often has few ways to verify it.

In many ways AI’s supportiveness is also its biggest weakness. A Stanford study, published in Science last month, found that leading chatbots endorse user behaviour 50 per cent more often than humans do in the same situations. The researchers called it an “insidious risk.” For careers support that’s a killer flaw, because good advice needs to be realistic and honest. A chatbot that tells every 18-year-old what they want to hear is unlikely to lead to positive outcomes.

The Nuffield Foundation and Ada Lovelace Institute made a related point in a report last month: the warmth of chatbots gives young people the impression they’re getting the equivalent of human guidance. They aren’t. And as always, the people who’ll suffer are those with the least access to other more reliable sources, be that parents or overstretched careers advisers.

Careers services across the board face significant pressure. With UK youth unemployment at its highest rate in a decade and almost a million young people not in education, employment or training, the gap is huge. At the same time, schools, colleges and training providers in England face strengthened legal obligations to provide independent careers guidance to every secondary-age learner. The Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 tightened these requirements and the updated Gatsby Benchmarks set the standard, including a benchmark devoted to personal guidance from a careers adviser. Ensuring that this advice keeps pace with the changes in the jobs market will be a massive challenge.

Ignoring AI is both unrealistic and undesirable. It can complement human support rather than replace it. Built properly, an AI powered interface could improve engagement, take the heavy lifting out of onboarding, and free up adviser time for the young people who need it most. With the right context it can be a powerful engine for skills mapping, pathway analysis and personalised recommendations. With the right guardrails it can sit safely alongside human coaches and mentors. Imagine a tool that actually understands the local apprenticeship market, knows what the levy can and can’t fund, and can help an 18-year-old weigh up an apprenticeship against a university course. It then supports them through the application, while flagging anything that needs a human adviser’s eye.

AI has already changed the landscape for careers support. The biggest question for colleges, careers leads and government is whether we can adapt and incorporate the best bits while mitigating the considerable risks. How well we answer it will shape the prospects of hundreds of thousands of young people over the coming years.