How to Use This Guide

Welcome. Treat this site as a toolbox you open when you need a particular tool, and take the pieces that fit where you are right now.

Every person’s transition looks a little different. Some of you are eighteen months out and planning carefully. Some separated last month and need an offer by spring. Some have a clear target and some are still working out what the target should be. All of those are good places to start from, and there is a route through here for each of them.

The 20-minute version

If you only have one sitting, do this:

1. Open an AI tool in another tab. Any of the ones on the AI Basics page will work. Free tiers are fine.

2. Run the Strengths Inventory prompt. It is the first prompt on Discover Your Strengths. Give it your real details — rank, job, how many people you led, what you were responsible for. Spend five minutes on your answer, not thirty seconds.

3. Run the Military-to-Civilian Translator prompt from Translate Military Experience on your three proudest accomplishments.

   Then spend five minutes on Where to Look First. It decides which market you are aiming at, and aiming at the wrong one wastes months.

4. Save the output somewhere you will find it again. A document, a note, an email to yourself. This becomes the raw material for your resume, your LinkedIn profile, and your interview answers.

That output — a plain-English inventory of what you did and what it is worth on the open market — is the single most useful document you can own during a job search. Your resume comes out of it. So do your LinkedIn profile, your interview stories, and your answer when someone asks what you are looking for. Build it once, keep it somewhere you will find it, and add to it as you remember more.

Everything else on this site builds on that one document.

The full path

The prompt library is numbered in the order most people need it. You do not have to go in order, but the sequence is deliberate: each stage produces something the next stage consumes.

Stage	What you produce	Feeds into
Where to Look First	A decision: federal, contractor, or commercial	Targeting, resume format, salary expectations
1. Discover Your Strengths	A strengths and accomplishments inventory	Everything
2. Translate Experience	Civilian-language versions of your record	Resume, LinkedIn
3. Build Your Resume	A tailored, ATS-readable resume	Applications
4. LinkedIn & Brand	A profile recruiters find	Networking
5. Market Research	A target list of roles, companies, and salary ranges	Applications, negotiation
6. Networking	Outreach messages and a contact rhythm	Referrals
7. Applications	Cover letters and tailored submissions	Interviews
8. Interviews	Rehearsed stories and sharp questions	Offers
9. Negotiation	A clear number and a script	Your offer
10. Skills & Certs	A learning plan that closes real gaps	Better roles
11. First 90 Days	An onboarding plan	Keeping and growing the job
Succeeding at Work	Benefits decisions, collaboration, feedback, boundaries	The rest of your career

How the prompts work

Every prompt on this site is a card with a Copy button in the corner. Click it, then paste into your AI tool.

Inside the prompts you will see highlighted placeholders like [YOUR MOS/RATING/AFSC] or [PASTE THE JOB DESCRIPTION]. Replace the whole bracket, brackets included, with your own detail before you send it.

The single biggest improvement you can make

The quality of what comes back tracks almost perfectly with the amount of real detail you put in.

Compare two answers to the same question. “I was in the Army for eight years” gives the tool almost nothing to work with, so it returns something generic.

“I was a 25B for eight years, finished as a Staff Sergeant, ran a help desk of 14 soldiers supporting 2,000 users across three sites, cut average ticket resolution from three days to under eight hours, and held a TS/SCI” gives it scope, scale, a measurable result and a credential. What comes back is something you can put straight on a resume.

The habit to build: tell it everything, including the parts that feel ordinary to you. Team sizes, dollar figures, how many sites, how often, how long, who you briefed. You can always trim later, and the detail you think is unremarkable is usually the detail a hiring manager finds most convincing.

Working with the output

Treat every response as a first draft from an enthusiastic assistant who has never met you. Good raw material, and yours to shape.

• Push back freely. “That’s too corporate — make it sound like a person.” “You added a number I never gave you; take it out.” “Give me three more options, shorter.” Direction is what these tools respond to best, and you are good at giving direction.
• Stay in the same conversation. The tool carries everything you have already told it, so each answer builds on the last. One long thread for your resume, another for interview prep, another for company research. You will notice the quality climbing as the context accumulates.
• Keep every fact yours. If a line says you “increased efficiency by 40%” and you cannot say where that figure came from, replace it with one you can defend. Every number on your resume should be one you would happily spend ten minutes discussing in an interview — and the ones you can defend are more persuasive anyway.

Checklists and progress

The checklists remember what you have ticked off, stored privately in your own browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere and nobody else can see it.

Because that record lives on the device you are reading this on, clearing your browser data or switching to a different computer will give you a clean slate. For the items that matter most — deadlines, contacts, dates you were given — keep a copy in your own notes as well.

Next: Where to Look FirstFederal, contractor, or commercial — the decision that shapes everything downstream.

AI Basics for Job SeekersWhich tool to use, how to set one up, and what it costs.

Keeping your work safeTwo minutes on handling cleared and personal material with confidence.