Over fifty and new to AI
Practice a useful conversation, typed or spoken, with the AI assistant your employer allows or your own at home: your words turned into a clean letter, a long form put into plain words, a new system learned at your own pace. The checking stays yours, and sending, money, access and decisions about people stay with a person.
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9 short lessons · 53 min of audio · a final exam and a course certificate
New to the tool, not to the work: use an AI assistant at your own pace to ask clearly, tidy your own words, understand long letters and check what it tells you.
what an assistant is and is not, asking clearly and asking again, and your own words tidied with nothing added: New to the tool, not to the work; Ask clearly, then ask again; Your words first
the long letter in plain words, the answer that sounds sure and is wrong, and a patient tutor for a new system at work: The long letter, in plain words; Sure is not the same as right; A patient tutor for the new system
talking to it on your phone and reading what it heard, the list of things you never give out, and one card with a weekly look back: Talk, then read; The never list; Your week, on one card
One side of one page, by the keyboard or on your work phone: the assistant you may use for work, the follow-up questions that help, your words first, your check at the source, what you are learning now, your never list, who you call back and how, and who decides what. A weekly sitting keeps it true as your work changes.
The certificate names that artefact and the tools you used — not a title. It carries a code anyone can check: verify a certificate.
The opening of lesson one, exactly as it plays inside — and the exercise that comes with it, which you can do right now without an account.
It tends to arrive the same way. Somebody at work says everyone should start using AI. A new window appears on the computer, or a new app on the work phone. Nobody sits down with you to show you anything, and everyone around you seems to talk about it as if they had always known.
From the outside, you cannot tell who has been using it for a long time and who has only just opened it. Being new to it is ordinary, at any stage of a working life.
Being new to the tool is not the same as being new to the work.
You will meet Gloria in every lesson, and she has a long working life behind her. Many years of it were in bank branches, the last of them as an assistant manager. Then she stepped away from paid work to care for her father. Now she is back, as the administrative coordinator in the facilities office of a community college: the office that handles repairs, room setups, keys and contractors. She knows how to read small print, calm an upset customer and write a letter that gets an answer. What is new is the assistant.
So, what an AI assistant actually is. It is a program you talk to in ordinary sentences, typed or spoken. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot are examples. It has learned, from a vast amount of writing, how sentences usually go, and it uses that to produce an answer, a draft or an explanation. That is why it sounds so fluent.
Try it now · Find your approved assistant, then test it
Where:Your manager or IT first, then an assistant you may use, on non-work ground
I worked in [your old trade or field] for many years. Explain [something in it you know thoroughly], and afterwards I will tell you what you got wrong.
The rest of the catalogue is there when you need it — but you do not have to choose anything today. One course, one short lesson at a time, one page at the end.
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