Build Your Career Agent, AVC248

Description

This is the heart of the capstone. You are going to generate your own personalized class, a link-rich self-study syllabus written just for you, built from your real dream-job posting and your honest reflection from the last assignment. You give an AI tool a clear prompt with your background, and it returns a Markdown study plan with modules, skills, real course links, applied tasks, and a self-assessment checklist. In other words, you build the class that bridges the gap to the job you want.

The plan comes back as a Markdown file (a .md). That file is your career agent. You download it, run it, and keep improving it long after this course ends.

Learning Objectives

By completing this assignment you will be able to:

Turn a real job posting and an honest self-reflection into a focused, personalized study plan.
Use a clear, reusable prompt to make an AI tool generate a link-rich Markdown syllabus.
Run and iterate that syllabus as a portable agent file you own.

Step 1: Copy this prompt

Open Claude (or another AI chat tool). Paste the prompt below, then fill in the three bracketed sections with your real dream-job posting, your reflection from the last assignment, and a short description of your background. The clearer your inputs, the better your syllabus.

You are a design-career mentor and curriculum designer. I am a community college Digital Media Arts student about to finish my degree, and I want to build my own personalized study plan to close the gap to a specific dream job.

Here is the real job posting I am targeting:
[PASTE THE FULL JOB POSTING HERE]

Here is my honest reflection on the gap between this job and where I am now (skills, experience, portfolio, and network):
[PASTE YOUR GAP REFLECTION HERE]

Here is more about my background, the tools I already know, how much time I can commit each week, and how I learn best:
[DESCRIBE YOUR BACKGROUND, CURRENT SKILLS, WEEKLY HOURS, AND LEARNING STYLE]

Please generate a personalized self-study syllabus for me in Markdown. Requirements:
- Start with a short Profile section and a clear statement of the job I am closing the gap to, then list the gaps in plain language.
- Create 4 to 6 modules, each roughly two weeks of work, ordered so each builds on the last.
- For each module, give me: skills to own, vocabulary to own, 2 to 4 REAL free or low-cost learning resources with working links, and one applied task that becomes a portfolio or reel piece.
- End with a final self-assessment checklist of plain-language “I can...” statements grouped by skill area, using Markdown checkboxes.
- Add a short closing section on how to run and improve this file over time, including a note that each AI chat starts fresh so this file is the spine I drive.
- Keep the tone encouraging and practical. Use real, working links to real resources. Output clean Markdown I can save as a .md file.

Worked examples: three real Render personas

Here are three real examples built with this exact prompt, using three of the actual Render Career Launch personas. They are the same kind of file, built the same way, but pointed at three different goals, so together they cover all three Render scenarios: a full job search, a 50/50 split, and an all-in freelance business.

Maya Chen (graphic design, 100% job search) is finishing her Digital Media Arts degree at Glendale Community College. She is strong in Illustrator, InDesign, typography, and print production, and her reach is a Junior Brand Designer job at a creative studio doing identity and packaging work. Her plan moves through typography and brand systems, After Effects for brand designers (her motion gap), packaging and print production, UX foundations and presenting work, and finally portfolio, case studies, and network activation.

Riley Torres (animation, 50/50 freelance and job search) is finishing the Animation and Time-Based Media degree at the same college and already ships 2D character animation for indie games. Riley runs two tracks at once: growing a steady freelance practice with repeat clients AND actively looking for a junior or staff animation job. The plan closes the cut-out rigging gap (which serves both), sharpens game-ready sprite pipelines, then covers the business side and the job-search side: contracts and pricing for freelance, plus a reel, case studies, and interview prep for hiring.

Nina Okafor (photography, 100% freelance business) is finishing her Digital Media Arts degree and is confident behind the camera but has almost no paid work. She is not chasing a job. Her reach is a sustainable freelance photography business of her own, portraits, small-business and brand work, and events. Her plan builds the book, sets pricing, writes contracts and releases, finds and keeps clients, and launches a portfolio site, booking flow, and the money basics.

↓ Download Maya’s career agent (graphic design, job search) (.md)

↓ Download Riley’s career agent (animation, 50/50 freelance and job) (.md)

↓ Download Nina’s career agent (photography, freelance business) (.md)

Open any of them in a text editor or paste one into an AI tool to see how a finished agent reads. Yours will look different, because it is built around your goal and your gaps. That is the point.

Step 2: Save, run, and iterate your agent

Download the file. When the AI finishes, copy the Markdown and save it as a file named something like career-agent.md. In Claude you can often download it directly. Otherwise paste it into a plain text editor and save with the .md ending.
Read it once, all the way through. Does the order make sense? Are the links real and useful? If a module feels off, ask the AI to revise just that part. You are the editor.
Run it weekly. When you sit down to work, paste the file back into the AI and say where you are, for example, “Here is my career agent. I just finished the Module 2 task. What is the most useful next step for my hours this week?” The AI gives you a focused plan; you do the work.
Iterate it. Each time you finish a task, learn something, or get an interview, update the file. Check off the checklist items. Add links to work you made. Shrink old gaps and add new ones. The agent grows up with you.
The honest note. Each AI chat starts fresh and remembers nothing about you. That is exactly why this file matters: it is the spine you carry from chat to chat and from tool to tool. The AI is the helper. The file, and the work, are yours.

How to Submit

Submit your finished career-agent .md file (or a link to it), plus two or three sentences on what your plan focuses on first and why. Keep your own copy somewhere safe, like Google Drive, so you always have it after Canvas access ends.