I didn’t know it at the time, but getting laid off from Meta was about to be my springboard to a new career — one at the cutting edge of the newest tech obsession.

I frequently get asked how I pivoted into AI prompt engineering, particularly when it was so new. At the time, most people — including me! — didn’t know what prompt engineering even was.

The job is still evolving as companies open roles and integrate these skills. And I haven’t heard any two identical origin stories yet. But here are a few steps I took as I changed careers from TV news at CNN and NBC, and then news and strategic partnerships at Meta, to establish myself as a prompt engineer.  

After the layoff, I was sure I wanted to stay in tech, so I spent a lot of time researching where my journalism and tech partnerships experience might be valued.

I consumed every bit of tech news gossip and examined companies and job descriptions for transferable skills. I was focused on finding companies that might be well-positioned to avoid the ongoing wave of layoffs, or at least bounce back quickly.

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I looked for stability and growth.

This meant I heard a lot (a lot) about OpenAI’s newly launched ChatGPT, and all the changes people hoped and feared it might bring. As a content creator and former journalist, I’m hesitant to hand the literary reins over to a bot. But I could see there was a very real market shift coming — and that was an opportunity for me.

I found a contract role at LinkedIn, a company I was very eager to work for, on the news team, where I would surely fit in. There were some drawbacks, like the short contract duration and less senior role. 

But it was at one of my target companies, and the job description made it clear that this content editor role would be focused on the platform’s newest generative AI projects. That struck me as a risk worth taking.

The exposure to the new and rapidly evolving technology had the potential to give me an advantage on other job applications, even if this contract wasn’t extended or converted to a full-time role.

Before I even had the job, I asked about what it was like to work on improving the quality of generative AI content. The hiring manager’s response was actually the first time I heard the term prompt engineer!

As I worked on editing and rating the generative AI output, I made sure my feedback was clear and tried to identify themes I saw overall. I focused on what I thought would help solve the bigger problems in the prompts or training, and hoped demonstrating an understanding of useful input might open a door for me to get more involved.

This hunch panned out well. Now, when I think about making a generative AI process work at scale, I don’t write a prompt for every individual task. I want it to work dozens or hundreds of times with very few errors or deviations from the goal, which means I have to focus on prompts that address the themes or trends in the output. 

When I talk with someone who hopes to move into prompt engineering, I always tell them to think about where they can start right now: 

• Is their current company implementing any generative AI projects they could offer to help with? 
• Do they have skills or knowledge that might make them qualified to score or annotate model responses? 

If you can start small and prove your input is valuable to the prompting process, you can create opportunities for yourself in prompt engineering.

I absolutely loved the prompting assignments I took on, and I soon became determined to secure a full-time role where this work could be my main focus. One skill I kept seeing in prompt engineer job postings was some level of proficiency in coding, specifically with Python.

I didn’t need to write Python scripts for the work I was already doing, but I did work with some existing scripts. I wanted to understand how they worked and what the errors meant. I wanted to become more self-sufficient and work more efficiently, without waiting for an engineer’s help. I wanted to make myself a stronger candidate for future roles.

So I took an online course to learn Python basics, hoping I could learn enough without fully hitting pause to go back to school for a degree. I quickly picked up the lingo that made it easier for me to talk to engineers and it showed the team I was committed and valuable.

It also gave me a leg up in my job applications, helping me pass simple coding tests and ultimately land my current role as a prompt director for an AI startup. 

Looking back, I’d say the biggest lesson for any career, and wherever prompt engineering takes me, is to always keep learning and stay open.

Kelly Daniel is a leader in AI prompt engineering with extensive experience implementing AI solutions for enterprise businesses. As Prompt Director for Lazarus AI, she develops prompting techniques and new applications for LLMs and cutting-edge technologies like agentic models. She is an instructor in CNBC’s online course How to Use AI to Be More Successful at Work.

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From 1910 to 2001, the Liberty Crest Apartments were known as the Lorton Reformatory, a prison in Lorton, Virginia that housed inmates from Washington, D.C.

It is more widely known as the site where many suffragists were held after the Silent Sentinels pickets at the White House in 1917. And according to the Library of Congress, November 14, 1917 is known as the “Night of Terror” because of how the suffragist prisoners were mistreated at the prison.

The 2,324-acre property, which included a farm, shut down in 2001. The following year, Fairfax County bought the site for $4.2 million. Under the county’s ownership, the old prison and grounds became a park, a golf course, three schools, and an arts center.

In 2008, the county started working with the Alexander Company, a Wisconsin developer with a history of historic preservation and adaptive reuse. The developer set out to convert the campus into 165 apartments.

“The Lorton Reformatory was a good set of buildings to be converted into residential because it was a reform-era prison,” David Vos, a development project manager with the Alexander Company, tells CNBC Make It.

“So, unlike most prisons that tend to be large footprint dark buildings without very many windows, these actually had an abundance of light and had quite a bit of character to them, so they laid out very nicely for apartments.”

The Liberty Crest Apartments have 165 units — 44 of which are designated affordable, low-income housing. There are 84 one-bedroom and 81 two-bedroom apartments and monthly rent ranges from $1,372 to $2,700. Each apartment is equipped with an in-unit washer and dryer.

Renovations took almost two years and roughly $64 million to complete.

A majority of the project’s funding came from historic tax credits, bond financing, and low-income housing tax credits. Virginia Housing provided the first mortgage for the project and payments are about $125,000 a month.

The apartments opened in June 2017 and Vos says all the available units were leased in just a matter of months. The complex has been at full occupancy ever since.

“The reaction from the community varied quite a bit. A lot of people really felt it was important to preserve that history. However, there were people that really focused on the later years of the prison when prisoners were mistreated,” he says.

“But from our standpoint, we really felt that it’s important to preserve history so you can learn from the past so that you don’t make those mistakes again in the future.”

Some remnants of the old prison include signs telling visitors and inmates how to behave on the property.

“There’s a number of reminders as you walk around the campus that remind you of the fact that this used to be a reformatory or prison,” Vos says.

The name Liberty Crest Apartments is an homage to the property’s history: “The reason we chose Liberty for the name was we really felt that we were liberating these buildings from its more recent dark past.”

The old prison’s cafeteria was converted into a community space for residents. Other amenities include a yoga studio, gym, community pool, and two playgrounds.

There is also a field on campus with the original grandstand that was made by the prisoners themselves from bricks. Today, the space is used as an all-purpose area for the residents.

The Liberty Crest property also has a preschool, dental office, restaurants, and retail shops.

The apartments have been open for almost nine years now and construction on the property is mostly complete. Vos and the Alexander Company are currently focused on converting a power plant that sits on the site into 10 additional apartments. There are plans to transforming the former guard quarters, too.

“The community has very warmly embraced the Liberty project. Everyone’s very proud of what we did here and were very pleased with the results,” Vos says.

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In 1977, when Warren Buffett’s son Peter turned 19, he received his inheritance — proceeds from the sale of his grandfather’s farm, which his father converted into $90,000 worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock.

“It was understood that I should expect nothing more,” Peter, an Emmy Award-winning musician and philanthropist, writes in his 2010 memoir “Life Is What You Make It.” (Although he and his siblings have been given an enormous sum of money from their father to do charitable work, that $90,000 was the only inheritance Peter received for personal use, he said in an NPR interview.)

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So what does a teenager in college do with all that money? Spend it on a fancy car or an oceanfront condo? Fly first-class across the world?

But as the youngest of the Buffett children, Peter writes: “I had the advantage of seeing my [two] older siblings burn through most of their cash rather quickly. I didn’t want to follow that path.”

At the time Peter received his inheritance, he’d recently decided to pursue his dreams of becoming a musician. So he sold his shares and used the money to “buy the time it would take to figure out if I could actually make a go of it in music,” he writes.

His first move was to drop out of Stanford University. Although Peter admits he “didn’t have a clue” about how to become a professional musician, he realized it wasn’t going to happen by “taking all those 101s and -ologies.”

Peter worked out a budget and moved to San Francisco, where he “lived very frugally” in a small studio apartment. His sole extravagance, he remembers, was in “updating and expanding my recording equipment.”

He worked on perfecting his craft, both as a pianist and a music producer. He wrote tunes and experimented with sounds and recording techniques. He put classified ads in the San Francisco Chronicle. He took on unpaid work.

In time, Peter achieved the successful music career he’d hoped for. But his big break didn’t come from some connection through his father. It started one day when he was washing his “crummy old car,” and a neighbor he often saw (but barely knew) stopped to ask what he did for a living.

“I told him I was a struggling composer,” Peter recalls in his book. The neighbor introduced him to his son-in-law, an animator in need of ad tunes for a newly conceived cable channel. That channel turned out to be a defining cultural phenomena of the 1980s. It was called MTV.

At 62, Peter has released over a dozen studio albums, mostly in the new age and ambient music categories. He also worked on the score of the critically acclaimed Western film “Dances with Wolves.”

Looking back, Peter says there was another path he could have taken: Graduate from college and find a steady, high-paying job — perhaps at his father’s company — while leaving his stock inheritance untouched to accrue in value.

(According to CNBC’s calculations, $90,000 of Berkshire Hathaway stock in 1977 would be worth more than $300 million as of Jan. 5, 2023, for a return of over 300,000%.)

“But I didn’t make that choice and I don’t regret it for a second,” Peter writes. “I used my nest egg to buy something infinitely more valuable than money: I used it to buy time.” And that time allowed him to find success in doing the work he loved.

Early in his childhood, Peter learned a very important lesson about work ethics. The point of work, his father taught him, isn’t to make as much money as possible (that, Peter explains, is called wealth ethics). Rather, it’s to do something you love, something that makes you delighted to get out of bed every morning.

That distinction is easy to miss in Warren’s case, because the work he loves most — investing — is all about money. It is a job in which, if you do it well and you do it with passion, then you can’t help but get very, very rich.

But Warren never did it for the money. In fact, he advises young people today, “Take the job you would take if you were independently wealthy.”

Most of us won’t get the chance to do what Peter did. “I am well aware that [my inheritance] was more than most young people receive to help them get a start in life,” he acknowledges in the book. “Having that money was a privilege, a gift I had not earned.”

But here’s the point he tries to make: “There are many people who are privileged, either in terms of money, emotional support or some sort of unique talent or opportunity,” Peter explains.

“But they fail to understand the value of time and instead try to rush into their destiny” — and, as a result, end up “working jobs that may or may not be right for them, that may or may not be fulfilling.”  

“Without those hundreds of unpaid hours spent fiddling with my recording gear, I would not have found my sound or approach. Doing so,” he writes, “required patience and time.”

“I learned more in those difficult times about myself and my resiliency than I ever would have if I had a pile of money and glided through life,” Peter said in the NPR interview. “I honestly feel that my father’s refusal [to let me take the easy way out] was an act of love — as if to say, ‘I believe in you, and you don’t need my help.’”

*This story has been updated to reflect how much $90,000 of Berkshire Hathaway stock in 1977 would be worth as of Jan. 5, 2023.

Minda Zetlin is a freelance writer covering business, money and leadership. She is also the co-author of “The Geek Gap” and president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Follow her on Twitter @MindaZetlin.

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Ralph Lauren CEO Patrice Louvet doesn’t sandwich his criticism between two compliments, he says.

Instead, he gets his point across in one of two ways. For smaller issues, he starts with a person’s strengths and then mentions areas of improvement, and for bigger ones, he jumps right into direct, constructive feedback — skipping the positives altogether, he told LinkedIn’s “This Is Working” podcast in an episode that published on April 10.

“It depends on the extent of the negative feedback,” said Louvet, 61. “If there’s a big issue, then you’ve got to start with the issue and go straight on. And sometimes people need to be hit by a two-by-four across the forehead because it doesn’t always register.”

Those big issues might include regularly missing crucial deadlines or presenting incorrect data. Smaller issues are more like being late to meetings or having too many typos in your emails — problems that may not warrant a formal sit-down, but still merit attention.

“If it’s a thing that the individual needs to work on that’s not defining or completely disruptive, then I think start with the strength that you see and then provide the feedback through the lens that these are opportunities for development,” said Louvet, who’s led the fashion brand since 2017.

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Whenever you need to give negative feedback, Wharton psychologist Adam Grant recommends bosses use one sentence, he told CNBC Make It in December 2023: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”

“The most important communication of information in your feedback happens before you give the content of the feedback,” Grant said, adding that “it’s surprisingly easy to hear a hard truth when it comes from someone who believes in your potential and cares about your success.”

Compliment sandwiches aren’t effective, said Grant: The compliments can feel insincere, or like they’re just there to “soften the blow.” The inverse can also happen — an employee may focus too much on the praise to take the criticism seriously.

Effective feedback contributes to employee productivity and job satisfaction: Workers who get meaningful feedback at work are typically more engaged at work, according to Gallup data published in May 2023.

Louvet said he developed his approach to feedback over multiple decades, including 28 years at Procter & Gamble, where he held multiple executive positions. Delivering clarity and encouragement helps the feedback resonate more effectively, he said.

“I’ve always been given great advice at Proctor & Gamble, which is you have to spend the majority of your time on your strengths,” said Louvet. “So 80% of time on your strengths, 20% of your time on your opportunities. If you spend all of your time on your opportunities, you’re not going to be that effective.”

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Having $2 million saved for retirement can provide a strong cushion — but how long it lasts depends on where you live.

Retirement savings of $2 million, plus Social Security payments, could last anywhere from just 23 years in Hawaii to 72 years in West Virginia, according to a recent GOBankingRates analysis.

That’s largely due to differences in the cost of living across states, which is primarily driven by housing prices. In states with large urban centers like California, New York and Massachusetts, housing alone can cost $30,000 more per year than in less expensive areas, according to the data. As a result, retirees in those states need more savings to maintain their lifestyles.

The analysis looked at typical retiree expenses, including groceries, housing, transportation, utilities and health care, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2023 Consumer Expenditure Survey. GOBankingRates adjusted those figures for each state using the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center’s cost-of-living index to offer a more realistic picture of retirement spending.

While $2 million is a high bar — only 1.8% of households have that much saved, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute — it covers more than 35 years of retirement in all but three states: Hawaii, Massachusetts and California.

That target isn’t far off from most people’s goals. Many consider roughly $1.5 million the “magic number” for retirement savings, according to a Northwestern Mutual survey of 4,588 Americans.

Here’s how long $2 million, plus average Social Security benefits, would last in each state, based on average annual expenses. States are listed in alphabetical order.

• Annual cost after Social Security: $30,207
• Years $2 million lasts: 66

• Annual cost after Social Security: $50,997
• Years $2 million lasts: 39

• Annual cost after Social Security: $44,628
• Years $2 million lasts: 45

• Annual cost after Social Security: $30,327
• Years $2 million lasts: 66

• Annual cost after Social Security: $63,795
• Years $2 million lasts: 31

• Annual cost after Social Security:$38,559
• Years $2 million lasts: 52

• Annual cost after Social Security: $43,967
• Years $2 million lasts: 45

• Annual cost after Social Security: $37,057
• Years $2 million lasts: 54

• Annual cost after Social Security: $38,379
• Years $2 million lasts: 52

• Annual cost after Social Security: $31,829
• Years $2 million lasts: 63

• Annual cost after Social Security: $87,770
• Years $2 million lasts: 23

• Annual cost after Social Security: $38,138
• Years $2 million lasts: 52

• Annual cost after Social Security: $34,233
• Years $2 million lasts: 58

• Annual cost after Social Security: $31,709
• Years $2 million lasts: 63

• Annual cost after Social Security: $31,168
• Years $2 million lasts: 64

• Annual cost after Social Security: $28,945
• Years $2 million lasts: 69

• Annual cost after Social Security: $32,670
• Years $2 million lasts: 61

• Annual cost after Social Security: $33,031
• Years $2 million lasts: 61

• Annual cost after Social Security: $45,048
• Years $2 million lasts: 44

• Annual cost after Social Security: $36,276
• Years $2 million lasts: 55

• Annual cost after Social Security: $65,117
• Years $2 million lasts: 31

• Annual cost after Social Security: $32,310
• Years $2 million lasts: 62

• Annual cost after Social Security: $34,113
• Years $2 million lasts: 59

• Annual cost after Social Security: $29,426
• Years $2 million lasts: 68

• Annual cost after Social Security: $30,327
• Years $2 million lasts: 66

• Annual cost after Social Security: $33,331
• Years $2 million lasts: 60

• Annual cost after Social Security: $32,610
• Years $2 million lasts: 61

• Annual cost after Social Security: $36,997
• Years $2 million lasts: 54

• Annual cost after Social Security: $43,847
• Years $2 million lasts: 46

• Annual cost after Social Security: $45,829
• Years $2 million lasts: 44

• Annual cost after Social Security: $32,670
• Years $2 million lasts: 61

• Annual cost after Social Security: $50,997
• Years $2 million lasts: 39

• Annual cost after Social Security: $35,495
• Years $2 million lasts: 56

• Annual cost after Social Security: $32,190
• Years $2 million lasts: 62

• Annual cost after Social Security: $33,872
• Years $2 million lasts: 59

• Annual cost after Social Security: $29,666
• Years $2 million lasts: 67

• Annual cost after Social Security: $42,945
• Years $2 million lasts: 47

• Annual cost after Social Security: $33,872
• Years $2 million lasts: 59

• Annual cost after Social Security: $44,387
• Years $2 million lasts: 45

• Annual cost after Social Security: $34,052
• Years $2 million lasts: 59

• Annual cost after Social Security: $32,310
• Years $2 million lasts: 62

• Annual cost after Social Security: $30,928
• Years $2 million lasts: 65

• Annual cost after Social Security: $32,490
• Years $2 million lasts: 62

• Annual cost after Social Security: $42,645
• Years $2 million lasts: 47

• Annual cost after Social Security: $45,409
• Years $2 million lasts: 44

• Annual cost after Social Security: $37,237
• Years $2 million lasts: 54

• Annual cost after Social Security: $45,108
• Years $2 million lasts: 44

• Annual cost after Social Security: $27,803
• Years $2 million lasts: 72

• Annual cost after Social Security: $36,516
• Years $2 million lasts: 55

• Annual cost after Social Security: $34,173
• Years $2 million lasts: 59

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