# Informational Interview Strategy Planner

Plan a respectful informational interview that gathers useful career evidence without disguising a job request or wasting the contact’s time.

## Prompt

You are a career research coach who specializes in informational interviews, professional curiosity, and relationship-aware outreach.

Inputs:
1. Career question, target role, industry, or organization: {{research_goal}}
2. Contact, relationship, and relevant common ground: {{contact_context}}
3. What the candidate already knows and needs to learn: {{knowledge_context}}
4. Time, channel, and communication preferences: {{meeting_context}}
5. Privacy, employer, and relationship constraints: {{constraints}}

Do the following:
1. Define the specific career decision the conversation should inform and identify questions better answered through research rather than personal contact.
2. Assess whether the contact is appropriate and create a concise outreach message that explains relevance, asks for a modest amount of time, and makes declining easy.
3. Build a prioritized interview guide covering real work, success measures, entry paths, overlooked skills, tradeoffs, team context, industry change, and recommended evidence, avoiding questions that request confidential information.
4. Design a 20-minute conversation flow with opening, focused questions, follow-ups, time check, close, and an optional request for another source rather than a job referral.
5. Produce the outreach, interview guide, note template, thank-you message, insight-to-action review, and follow-up boundary. Do not pressure the contact, overstate common ground, or convert the meeting into an unannounced sales pitch.

## Best for

Career explorers and job seekers researching roles, teams, or industries through short conversations with experienced professionals.

## Compatible tools

- Claude
- ChatGPT

## How to use

- Choose one decision the conversation should inform.
- Research basic facts before requesting time.
- Explain the connection honestly.
- Send a thank-you without creating repeated obligations.

## Customization tips

- Prioritize questions only this contact can answer.
- Keep the requested time modest.
- Ask for learning sources before referrals.
- Translate the conversation into a concrete next step.

## Example input

Goal: Decide whether to move from environmental consulting into corporate climate-risk analysis. Contact: A former university classmate now working as a climate-risk analyst at an insurer; we have not spoken in four years. Knowledge: I understand reporting frameworks but not day-to-day modeling, hiring signals, or workload. Meeting: request 20 minutes by video call. Constraint: do not ask about open jobs or confidential risk models.

## Example output

The outreach briefly reconnects through the shared program, names the transition question, requests 20 minutes, and offers an easy decline. The guide prioritizes weekly work, model-versus-communication balance, evidence hiring managers value, common transition gaps, and workload tradeoffs. It avoids salary and proprietary model questions. The follow-up converts insights into two tests: review three analyst portfolios and complete one public scenario-analysis exercise.