This workshop proposal offers how an AI tool helps students land meaningful jobs while upholding Jesuit values. Students use our application to create portfolio projects that demonstrate their skills to employers while reflecting their personal values. This practical approach combines Ignatian discernment with targeted career preparation, helping students develop work samples that speak directly to what hiring managers need.
The AI application first parses job descriptions to highlight essential responsibilities and aligns them with each student’s interests, strengths, and career goals. Students then enter a reflective phase through the application guided by the Ignatian model, examining how a potential project can both address a company’s specific challenges and resonate with their personal values, while also allowing them to upload their resume to inform and refine their project selection. Finally, with clear objectives and context established, the application guides students toward potential projects that reflect typical responsibilities of the role, enabling them to develop hands-on projects using technologies directly from job descriptions, thus creating practical work samples that highlight their capabilities clearly to potential employers. By transforming the role-specific details into hands-on projects, students build a compelling portfolio project that showcases measurable outcomes, serving as a clear proxy for the value they would bring to the role, an approach intended to capture the attention of recruiters and hiring managers. We typically meet with students one-on-one to strategize projects that strengthen their candidacy. Using this AI application makes these sessions far more productive by focusing on refining the most relevant opportunities and coaching students on strategic ways to professionally connect with recruiters and hiring managers.
This method significantly enhances career readiness, boosting students’ confidence and increasing their chances of landing the job. Students who utilize this approach frequently receive job offers, especially when presenting these tailored projects during interviews. Previously, the method of meeting one-on-one without the AI application proved challenging to scale effectively; however, with the application, we can support more students efficiently. The workshop offers faculty and staff practical tools to mentor students, providing a template for integrating the Ignatian Inspirational Paradigm’s five key elements, context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation, into the process of career exploration. This workshop addresses the need for Jesuit business education to accompany young people in creating hope-filled futures by providing practical tools that integrate adult spiritual formation with professional development. It offers a replicable model that guides students from job description analysis to project development, preparing them professionally and grounding them in Jesuit values for today’s global workforce.