We are all looking to advance our careers and to find tips and tricks to help us get the leading edge in the industry. Technology certifications are a great way to to prove you have the expertise needed for the job. Sure, having expertise certainly helps when it comes to being more efficient with practical, everyday tasks, but nothing is really as efficient as having another Developer, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), or other technical professional to sit with you to help solve technical problems. While this is done often in the industry, it’s not always an option for every problem. The good news is, you can have someone with your every step of the way to help solve problems. And, that someone, is ChatGPT, so really more of an AI assistant than a person to pair with. Either way, this just may be the thing you need to get the leading edge to be a more efficient problem solver. This article covers some of the ways that adopting generative AI, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can help you in your career!

FYI, there are many skeptics on ChatGPT, but it really is just another tool. We all use search engines like Google, and forums like Stack Overflow. Now, we have yet another tool to helps us with the addition of ChatGPT.

Let’s look at the benefits of how you can use ChatGPT to help benefit your career as a Developer, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), or any other role in IT!

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a relatively new tool from OpenAI that provides a powerful AI chatbot that you can interact with using natural language. It uses natural language processing to understand what you ask and to write responses. The responses are generated based on a pool of data that was gathered from the Internet when the AI model was trained. In essence, ChatGPT used deep learning algorithms to analyze large amounts of information, then it generates a human-like response using natural language prompts.

ChatGPT is really the best chatbot yet! It knows stuff and can understand (as much as a current AI can understand) what you’re asking of it. It’s an extremely useful tool that can make research and problem solving much easier to do, thus increasing your job efficiency when used correctly.

Benefits of Adoption ChatGPT in Your Personal Workflow

By adopting ChatGPT now, you can take advantage of its vast capabilities to help you be better at your job. You can use ChatGPT to effectively be more efficient a problem solving and writing code, in addition to helping you figure out complex topics as you go. ChatGPT is a great tool that can be used to help you in your career, just as the other tools you are already using today!

The following are several of the benefits that you can see from taking advantage of ChatGPT today:

Improved Problem Solving

ChatGPT is a powerful tool that can really help you problem solve. It has access to a large amount of data from the Internet and it can come up with answers and possible solutions much faster than a traditional online search. You can ask it questions to quickly get responses targeted towards your very specific needs in real time. You can also refine your questions, iterate, and get more targeted responses as you further refine towards the necessary solution.

AI Prompting Tip: When using ChatGPT, you can ask it simple questions and you’ll get responses. However, asking more detailed questions will yield responses more highly tailored for your specific problem. Using AI Prompting techniques, you can become very proficient at getting ChatGPT to generate responses that are very useful and targeted to what you’re looking for. AI Prompting can make you extremely efficient at leveraging ChatGPT for problem solving and writing code.

Faster Learning

Another major benefit of using ChatGPT is its ability to facilitate faster more customized learning. Now, learning courses built by experts in the industry will always be great ways to learn. However, when you need quick responses on a specific topic, ChatGPT can be much faster at helping you learn something that the traditional online search methods to finding an answer.

By asking a series of questions to ChatGPT, it can guide you through learning almost anything you would need to solve your IT problems and/or write code. Beware though that ChatGPT can sometimes be incorrect, so you’ll still want to double-check and test the information it gives you to ensure it is accurate and up to date.

Improved Efficiency

ChatGPT can also help you become more efficient in both problem solving and writing code. Just as using sites like Stack Overflow can help you be more efficient, so can ChatGPT. However, ChatGPT will customize the answers to your specific questions, rather than the answers on sites like Stack Overflow that are specific to someone else’s unique problem. This difference makes ChatGPT an extremely powerful tool to help you problem solve and write code.

Again, remember always double-check the responses from ChatGPT for accuracy. When it comes to ChatGPT writing code for you, always make sure you understand the code and never blindly copy/paste. ChatGPT may be very helpful, but it’s still up to you as the professional to ensure you don’t unintentionally introduce bugs and security vulnerabilities in your solutions.

How to Leverage ChatGPT

Leveraging ChatGPT can be as simple as asking basic questions. It can also be more complex when using more advanced AI prompting techniques to get more specific responses that you’re looking for. There are several techniques to best leverage ChatGPT to be effective at helping you problem solve or write code.

The following are a few tips that can help leverage ChatGPT more effectively:

Start with Simple Tasks

If you’re new to ChatGPT, then start with some basic questions and familiarize yourself with the tool. Ask it multiple questions and figure out how it responds to different types of questions. As you become more familiar with ChatGPT, you will figure out your own style and technique for asking it questions to get the responses you’re looking for. You will also learn how to ask more advanced and details questions over time as you become more proficient with the tool.

Use for Research

Probably the best method of leveraging ChatGPT is for research. Just as you use search engines, like Google, for researching a topic, you can use ChatGPT for research purposes as well. Ask it questions, get a response, and learn something new. Then ask it questions based on the response it gave you to continue down the “rabbit hole” of learning as to progress towards learning about a topic more efficiently.w

Collaborate with Others

ChatGPT is also a great tool to use when you do have a chance to pair with other IT professionals on a problem. As the saying goes “two heads are greater than one”, so are two heads with the addition of an AI assistant. Especially when that AI assistant is ChatGPT and trained using the wealth of information on the Internet.

This can be helpful in facilitating group discussions, brainstorming new ideas, and solving problems. While ChatGPT isn’t going to be as creative as a human, it will answer those creative questions humans write to it. This can help generate lists of ideas, or potential steps to solve the problem at hand. All these things can help lead to a greater degree of efficiency in finding the end solution that works best.

Use AI Prompting

As you use ChatGPT, you will become more proficient with using it as a tool to answer questions, solve problems, and write code. While you can ask simple questions and pass it simple phrases, you can also write very complex queries with lots of detail for it to parse as well. The technique of writing effective questions to a generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is called “AI Prompting“.

Writing effective AI prompts is key to fully leveraging the power of ChatGPT. Instead of writing simple questions or phrases like when using a search engine, you can write it more complex questions with lots of details. ChatGPT will parse your question, understand the details given, and generate a response accordingly. AI prompting will help you become much more efficient at leveraging the full power of ChatGPT.

Use ChatGPT Safely and Securely

It’s always important to be safe and maintain a high level of security when leveraging any tool. You wouldn’t paste company secrets, confidential information, or any other sensitive information into a search engine or Stack Overflow. You must be careful as you use ChatGPT to never paste this type of sensitive information into ChatGPT either. While ChatGPT isn’t a person, it’s still a service that doesn’t have access to your companies’ secrets. You do not want to be fired or have legal action taken against you for leaking information because you used ChatGPT irresponsibly.

For the reasons of safety and security, it is possible that some companies may prohibit the use of ChatGPT or other generative AI tools. As early adopters of these technologies, it’s up to all of use to use them responsibly as we already do with other tools that help us get our jobs done.

Always be safe and mindful when using ChatGPT! Do not past confidential or sensitive information into your AI prompts. This may limit the ability of the AI to generate a 100% solution for your question, but you are an intelligent human that is certainly able to bridge the gap to get your work done.

Remember, ChatGPT isn’t doing your work for you, it’s just another tool to help you work more efficiently and effectively.

Conclusion

Adopting ChatGPT will help you gain the advantage that you need to be more efficient at problem solving and writing code for complex problems. ChatGPT can also help you learn much faster when you don’t have the time to go through a full training course, as you just need to figure out a very specific thing in the moment. All these advantages of ChatGPT could help you land that next promotion or even job interview as you work to advance your career. It’s an amazing tool to add to your toolbox as a developer, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), or any other role in IT.

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