• Workers can start taking steps now to help boost their careers into next year.
• People should enhance their AI skills to stay competitive, one executive told BI.
• Volunteering and side hustles can boost skills, empowerment, and career opportunities.

It's almost that time again: a new year and new opportunities to improve our work and ourselves.

Alongside starting a gym routine or giving up ultra-processed foods, you might consider taking steps now that might help you begin to boost your career.

Here are three ways you can start to level up your career — even before the end of 2024, according to workplace experts.

Get better with AI

Sean Barry, the vice president of talent acquisition at Allstate, told Business Insider that workers should try to become more proficient in artificial intelligence.

He said it's essential to realize that the technology will put a premium on a new set of skills for many people — like how to create an appropriate prompt for generative AI.

"That is not a skill that anybody talked about two years ago, and it's critically important now," Barry said, adding that people who are better at this will likely do better in their careers.

One way to improve your AI skills is simply to use it. Start by trying out chatbots and seeing what works.

It's become a cliché to say that AI won't replace you, but someone who knows how to use it will. Yet there are areas where AI might replace humans, which is why a better understanding of how AI works can be beneficial.

Kiki Leutner is cofounder of SeeTalent.ai, which is developing tests run by AI that would simulate tasks associated with a job to help the hiring process. She told BI that, traditionally, employers tended to use such tests for more senior roles only where it was worth the money and effort. Or, a company might give a software developer a coding task as a way of measuring proficiency.

Leutner said Generative AI can let employers test far more job seekers and across a broader range of roles than would otherwise be practical. Plus, she said, AI-run assessments can collect insights that previously were difficult to capture, such as how someone might interact with others.

Success in such areas often involves the soft skills employers say they're seeking and many bosses contend too many workers lack.

Share your skills by volunteering

You might feel too busy at work, yet carving out some time to help others can help you. A recent study from the University of Oxford found that volunteering proved more effective in boosting worker well-being than other interventions.

It's especially beneficial if it involves using your skills to assist others, according to Leila Saad, CEO of Common Impact, a nonprofit that connects companies and their workers with other nonprofits.

Saad told BI that many nonprofits lack the resources to meet all of their operational needs. So, when workers with that expertise can help, it benefits both the organization and the worker, she said.

"It feels good to give back skills you've honed over your entire career," she said.

That often trumps something like showing up for a one-off event like painting a school or planting trees, Saad said.

Beyond that, she said, workers — and their employers — can benefit if the employee might develop additional skills through volunteering.

Jennifer Schielke, the CEO of the staffing firm Summit Group Solutions and the author of "Leading for Impact," previously told BI that volunteering — even after something traumatic like losing a job — can help those newly out of work get a sense of perspective.

"If you have time to volunteer, go do it," she said. "Go get some encouragement by sitting alongside someone who has it worse than you do."

Consider starting a side hustle

Side hustles get a lot of attention when they're lucrative, yet there can be other benefits. They can be limited to weekend jobs, so workers' weekdays aren't too full. In other cases, side hustles might relieve burnout.

They can also make workers feel empowered.

Daniel Zhao, the lead economist at Glassdoor, told BI that workers in some industries feel stuck in their 9-to-5 roles because of lackluster hiring. That might be one reason more workers are picking up side hustles.

Zhao pointed to data gathered by Glassdoor and the Harris Poll. In a February survey of some 1,100 US adults, 39% reported having a side gig. The share was higher among younger workers: Fifty-seven percent of Gen Zers and 48% of millennials reported doing work in addition to their primary roles.

"Workers are much more willing to experiment nowadays," Zhao said. He pointed to rates of entrepreneurship, which he said "skyrocketed" during the pandemic.

Zhao said it's good news that entrepreneurship rates remain elevated following a "fairly weak" 2010s and said it indicates America's entrepreneurial spirit has recovered.

New business applications in the US have jumped to 431,000 a month in 2024, up 47% from 293,000 a month in 2019, Zhao said.

"Not only is that an opportunity for people to supplement their income on the side, but it also opens up new opportunities, new ideas, new technologies that can potentially boost the economy in the long run," he said.

• Jensen Huang is becoming more of a household name as Nvidia's value skyrockets amid the AI boom.
• The CEO has some unusual management practices, including having 60 direct reports and no 1-on-1s.
• Here are some of Huang's most notable tips when it comes to business leadership and management.

Nvidia overtook Apple and Microsoft separately earlier this month to briefly become the world's most valuable company.

With the AI chip company's stock skyrocketing, Huang has also seen his fame — and fortune — grow, and there are plenty of eyes on him to see how he runs one of the world's biggest companies.

Here is some of Huang's most notable advice for leading teams and managing a business.

Manage a lot of people

Huang believes a CEO should have more direct reports than anyone else in an organization. He, in fact, has 60 direct reports, considered an unusually high number for any manager.

"The more direct reports the CEO has, the less layers are in the company," Huang said in an interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit in 2023. "It allows us to keep information fluid, allows us to make sure that everyone is empowered by information."

Management exists "in service of all the other people that work at the company," he said in a separate interview with Stanford's Graduate School of Business earlier this year.

"I don't believe in a culture, in an environment, where the information you possess is the reason why you have power," he said.

Be transparent with decision-making

Asked how he manages 60 direct reports, Huang told an audience at Hong Kong University Of Science & Technology that it boils down to one thing.

"Transparency," he said.

"I reason in front of everybody what we need to do. We work together to come up with a strategy," he said. "Whatever strategy it is, everybody hears it at the same time because they were hearing all of us work through the strategy at the same time."

His job is then to make sure everyone comes away from the process with the same takeaway.

"I'm usually the last person to talk, to describe, based on everything that we've done, 'This is the direction, and these are the priorities,'" he added. "And to make sure that, if there's any ambiguity, I've taken out the ambiguity. Now once we're all aligned and we understand what the strategies are, I count on the fact that everyone is an adult."

"Nobody loses alone," he said. "Nobody fails alone."

Skip the 1:1 meetings

Huang has said he doesn't have one-on-one meetings with his many direct reports.

"Almost everything that I say, I say to everybody all at the same time," he said at Stripe Sessions 2024. "I don't really believe there's any information that I operate on that somehow only one or two people should hear about."

Give feedback publicly

In the same vein, Huang also believes in giving someone feedback in front of their peers.

"The problem I have with one-on-ones and taking feedback aside is you deprive a whole bunch of people that same learning," he said at Stripe Sessions. "Feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn this?"

He added that learning from other people's mistakes is "the best way to learn.

"Why learn from your own mistakes? Why learn from your own embarrassment? You've got to learn from other people's embarrassment," he said.

Communicate briefly and often

Nvidia employees can expect to receive a lot of emails from their chief executive. Huang sends his staff hundreds of emails a day, many of which are only a few words long, The New Yorker reported last year.

He expects employees to keep their email communications just as concise.

One former Nvidia worker told Business Insider's Jyoti Mann that "you'd get in trouble for sending a super-long email to him."

"The idea was to nail down what you have to say, send it, and if he, or others, need more information, then it's a conversation, not another email," the former Nvidian said.

Show your work

Huang believes showing others how you reason through a problem is "empowering."

"I show people how to reason through things all the time — strategy things, how to forecast something, how to break a problem down, and you're just empowering people all over the place," he said in the Stanford Graduate School of Business interview.

He continued: "If you send me something and you want my input on it and I can be of service to you and in my review of it, share with you how I reasoned through it, I've made a contribution to you. I've made it possible to see how I reason through something."

That can lead to a lightbulb moment.

"You go, 'Oh my gosh. That's how you reason through something like this. It's not as complicated as it seems.'"

Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold two companies for billions of dollars, collectively. Now he plans to take his food delivery and take-out business Wonder public in a couple of years at an ambitious $40 billion valuation. We talked with Lore in person in New York recently about Wonder and its ultimate aim of making […]

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