Reflecting on Your Career Path with Kin
Working out whether past career choices were correct—and which should be taken next—is only getting harder. How can AI help?
The modern workplace has transformed dramatically over the past decade. With remote work becoming standard, artificial intelligence entering workplaces, and career trajectories becoming increasingly digital and non-linear, traditional approaches to career development are becoming increasingly obsolete.
As such, the question of “is technology a good career path” is becoming more popular—especially when fields like information technology and cybersecurity can offer dynamic promising career objectives for both entry-level positions and experienced professionals.
But, how do people properly reflect on their career path, and find what’s right for them? How can personal AI like Kin show helpful insights?
I’m Yngvi Karlson, Co-Founder of Kin. Born in the Faroe Islands, I’ve spent my career building startups, with two exits along the way, and five years as an active venture capitalist. Now, I’m dedicated to creating Kin, a personal AI people can truly trust.
Follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok and X
To answer that, I’ll cover the following in this article:
What is a Career Path?
The Importance of Career Reflection
The Core Components of Career Reflection
Building an Effective Career Reflection Practice
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Career Reflection
How does Personal AI Help?
How Kin Enhances Career Reflection as a Personal AI
So, let’s go.
What is a Career Path?
Firstly, we must define a career path.
A career path represents the sequence of roles, experiences, and skills that shape professional progression over time—essentially, the things that people do and learn that impact their career.
The Four Career Paths
Traditional career paths typically fall into these four main categories:1
1. Knowledge-based
These paths see someone build their career through gained knowledge, whether that’s from moving up the corporate ladder, upskilling, studying, or a mixture of the three.
Human resources, marketing, accounting, information technology, and engineering roles often come under this category.
2. Skills-based
Similar to knowledge-based careers, but in relation to physical skills like service, performance arts, or construction. In these roles, experience tends to matter more than anything.
3. Entrepreneur-based
A less-standardized path, entrepreneur-based career paths see people begin their own company to fill an identified market gap. The path often includes the elements of knowledge- and experience-gaining the previous two paths contain, but with the end goal of creating and maintaining a new successful company.
4. Freelance-based
Landing somewhere between the first two paths and the entrepreneur-based path, freelance-based career paths see people offer out their knowledge and skills on a temporary basis to businesses and individuals.
It’s most common for writers, consultants, tradespeople, and artists to offer their services in this way, but most professions can.
It can be useful for people to know which career path they fall under, as this can help them recognise their natural tendencies, and create effective goal setting toward an ambition.
The Five Career Pathways
The five career pathways often come up in career discussions, and refer to the five health science career pathways—the specific routes people can take into a healthcare career.2
While not extensively covered in this article, these are:
Diagnostic Services
Therapeutic Services
Health Informatics
Support Services
Biotechnology Research & Development
Though these can be helpful if considering a way into a healthcare career, they are not as broad as their four traditional kin above.
Early on in a career journey, it’s still worth asking questions like “is technology a good career path?” or “what about business management?” to reflect on paths travelled so far, and find the best personal fit.
But why is this important?
The Importance of Career Reflection
Career reflection is crucial to professional growth, because it helps individuals take control of their own career and make informed decisions about their career trajectory. In fact, research shows that those who engage in career reflection and exploration are often happier with their jobs.3
What’s more, reflection on the skills and experience someone has developed, and the ways they’ve done this over their career journey, are indispensable parts of improving mindset, increasing emotional intelligence, and perfecting work-life balance.
Without this power of perspective, it can be hard to plan a path to a dream career, or figure out why a job feels so miserable—even if a career coach is hired.
So, if it’s so important, how is career reflection done?
The Core Components of Career Reflection
Bearing some similarity to journaling for anxiety and self evaluation, the process of career reflection is all about providing a clear picture of what career path has been followed, and how well that’s fit.
But what does this look like?
1. Thorough Assessment
Firstly, to assess a current position along a career trajectory, take stock of everything that has been experienced up to this moment. This process is often supported by mentors, career counselors, or, as will be discussed, personal AI tools like Kin.
Consider factors like:
Specific Skills: What has been learnt, and how advanced is the knowledge? Remember to include hard and soft skills.
Level of Responsibility: How much has been trusted to these skillsets?
Years of Experience: How long has this career journey been so far? How long has each skill been learnt and applied for?
Scope of impact: What has been achieved by those skills in that time?
Comparison to Industry Standards for your field. LinkedIn and other professional organizations often provide benchmarks for different career stages, from entry-level to executive positions.
2. Practical Evaluation
Next, consider how effectively and easily these skillsets were gained, and what they bring to the current career trajectory stage. Were there faster ways to reach the same level? Are there new skills needed to fill gaps growing within these specific skills?
3. Emotional Evaluation
Now, look at the previous step from an emotional perspective. What feelings do those skills—and the ways they were acquired—provoke? Does the current level of ability in this career path and progress inspire pride, indifference, or disappointment? What situation (or even different career paths) might have been preferred? Does this experience align with personal values?
This step can feel superfluous to some, but it’s not just an essential step for growing emotional intelligence—it can often reveal the culprit behind burnout and job dissatisfaction.
4. Reconsider Goals:
Finally, review any career goals alongside this information. Is the current career trajectory leading to these goals? Are these goals even still what’s wanted? What new roles or skills are needed, and how can this career trajectory be updated to meet them?
Initiatives like continuous learning or journaling may be implemented here to help.
But what comes next?
Building an Effective Career Reflection Practice
Next is all about ensuring the assessment process above is carried out regularly, effectively, and with sustainability. This helps personal career goals always stay true to personal ambitions, as it informs effective milestones for both entry-level workers and experienced professionals.
To do this, consider the following steps to help make this a strong habit:
1. Define Preferences
Decide what medium, time and location is best for the career reflection.
Are notebooks easier to use, or is a touchscreen or keyboard preferred? Are mornings uncluttered, or does the night finally give space to think? Is a bustling environment appreciated, or is quiet solitude?
Ensuring that the best personal working conditions can be arranged like this will minimize distractions and irritations.
2. Foster Consistency
Now, look for ways to connect these preferences to existing habits to make them easier to keep. Have five minutes on the morning train? Jot down some thoughts. Like a Saturday snooze? Reflect on the week once you wake up.
The tighter reflection is tied to old habits, the easier it will be to remember to do it as well.
3. Have Conversations
Finally, talk about the findings. Tell friends, family, colleagues, mentors, personal AI, everyone. Each person has a unique insight and perspective to share, and can do so from within their own career pathway, and not anyone else’s.
But, that can be a lot of work. How can this be more effective?
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Career Reflection
Digital tracking and pattern recognition capabilities in AI tools like AI chatbots and AI companions have transformed how professionals understand themselves, their colleagues, and their career trajectories.
Technology like these machine learning algorithms can analyze years of career and behaviour data to identify trends in employee and global industry behaviour alike, meaning employees and their companies can respond to them more quickly than ever.
Other AI tools like AI assistants make it easier for both employers and employees to track employee engagement, upskilling, and performance by logging information about these metrics, and analyzing it against their datasets. Similarly, this allows employers and their staff to recognise and respond to things like skill gaps and job satisfaction much faster.
Perhaps the most powerful of these tools has been personal AI.
How does Personal AI Help?
Personal AI’s power comes from its ability to provide all of the above on an individual level, often from a mobile phone. With 24/7 support, and the ability to process a lot of historical and web data quickly, these tools can quickly give personalized insights on career trajectories—valuable guidance, alongside traditional mentors and training programs.
How Kin Enhances Career Reflection as a Personal AI
Kin represents a new generation of personal AI tools designed specifically for long-term support of personal and professional growth.
Its empathetic Chat and Journal features allow users to easily provide its advanced memory with a comprehensive and searchable record of their professional life—which it then analyzes to track progress toward career objectives, and identify potential new career and certification opportunities in real time.
This makes career path planning and reflection easier, as Kin can draw on all of this knowledge to help users generate a tailored roadmap to reaching their career objective based on their individual needs. It can even show trends in habits to help users realise what’s working and what isn’t for them—almost like a Kin TV show that summarises the last few seasons.
Its Reminder feature then allows users to set reminders about habits, tasks and opportunities within the app, so Kin can send push notifications to help keep its users on track, or just remind them to check in regularly.
If that sounds like it requires a lot of personal data, though, that’s because it does—but Kin was designed for trust.
Why Can You Trust Kin with Privacy?
All the personal data Kin collects is anonymous, and is both stored and processed on the user's device wherever possible. Third-party processing, when necessary, takes place with approved vendors and robust encryption—and all of this means that not even Kin as a company can access personal data.
What’s more, users maintain complete control over their data, with the ability to view, modify, or delete any and all stored information at any time.
Get Started Today with Your AI Companion
Ready to improve your own career reflection with Kin? Download the app here and begin with this message template for Kin:
"Hi Kin! I'd like to start reflecting on my career more effectively. I'm currently [your role] at [your company], and I've been thinking about [specific area of reflection]. My biggest career questions right now are [your questions]. Could you help me build a reflection practice?"
From there, Kin will guide you through creating a personalized development plan that evolves with your professional life. The system provides template ideas for career planning, skill tracking, and professional development documentation, so you maintain a comprehensive view of your career journey while ensuring your personal data remains secure and private, and your time minimally taken up.
Stahl, A. 2021. “4 Booming Career Paths To A Secure Your Future In 2022”. forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2021/12/31/4-booming-career-paths-to-a-secure-your-future-in-2022/. [Accessed 01/28/25]
Stauffer, B. 2024. “What Are the 5 Health Science Career Pathways?” www.icevonline.com. Available at: https://www.icevonline.com/blog/health-science-career-pathways [Accessed 01/28/25]
Werbel, J.D. 2000. “Relationships among Career Exploration, Job Search Intensity, and Job Search Effectiveness in Graduating College Students”. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 57(3), pp.379–394. doi:https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.2000.1746. [Accessed 01/28/25]