For years, I’ve had the same experience in program design conversations with associations
We always start by diving into the real needs of members. They are overwhelmed by options. They do not always know what to do next or where to begin. They want on-demand career support that feels relevant to their role, their stage, and their goals. And as our team’s understanding of the depth of the needs gets more clear, the ideas for how to solve those needs naturally become more ambitious. What if the program we are designing could guide them through their biggest (and smallest) challenges? What if it could surface the just right recommendation at the just right moment? What if it could feel less like a menu of offerings and more like an essential career partner who is always there to help?
In those meetings, I also find myself thinking about the ‘member moment’ where the needs we have been thinking about show up in real life:
It’s 1:30 in the morning. The member is awake, staring at the ceiling, running through the same loop of questions. Am I falling behind? Should I take that job? Do I have the skills I need? How do I get unstuck? Who do I even ask?
In these moments, members are not looking for a long list of resources. They are looking for clarity, confidence, and a next step they can trust.
That is the kind of moment associations want to show up for, because it’s exactly where trusted guidance can have the most impact on the trajectory of someone’s career.
Most of the time, though, when teams start to dream about meeting those kinds of moments, they are forced to settle into a quiet reality check. The most compelling ideas are too expensive, technically challenging, or resource-intensive. Highly tailored experiences require too much manual effort. So scaling that kind of guidance across thousands of members often means compromising toward generic pathways, broad segmentation, or serving up long lists of resources that still leave members doing the hard work of figuring out what matters when they are struggling the most.
How AI is changing program design conversations
But now, with the advent of AI, we can finally revisit our most powerful ideas with a new level of feasibility.
With the right guardrails, experience design, and association expertise behind it, AI can help associations deliver career partnership experiences that are more personalized, more scalable, and more consistent than we ever imagined possible. Not by replacing the expertise, relationships, and credibility that make an association valuable, but by making that value more accessible and actionable for every member. These new capabilities give associations a way to serve up the most relevant recommendations, prompts, and next steps based on what members are trying to accomplish in the moment, and to do it in a way that can scale without becoming unsustainable.
That is the thinking, and the promise, behind Highland’s new AI Career Partner offering.
At its best, an association is already a career partner. It understands the profession, it understands the pathways, and it understands the community. The opportunity in front of us now is to deliver that value in a way that feels more immediate and more individualized for members, especially in the moments when they most need clarity, confidence, and direction.
