There is something important about asking students and early-career talent not just what job they want, but what they can build.

On June 5th, ChatAndBuild joined LinkedIn's Trailblazer Camp for a hands-on session led by Founder and CEO Christel Buchanan. The session "From Job Search to Proof of Work: Creating Your Career Agents with ChatChat" marked the beginning of the programme's next phase: a two-week AI hackathon where participants will build agents, automate workflows, and create practical tools around real problems in their study, work, and professional lives.

The invitation came from the LinkedIn team behind the Trailblazer Camp series: Heather Koh, Pratap Kaul, and Holly Fang, who have built a programme designed to take the next generation of talent seriously, not just in how they present themselves, but in what they are capable of creating.

The first phase of the camp focused on personal branding, visibility, networking, and career readiness. This session moved the cohort into something more demanding: career creation.

The question at the centre of it was simple.

What can you build that shows how you think?

From profiles to proof of work

For decades, career-building has centred around resumes, applications, and profiles. Those still matter. But as AI changes how people learn, work, and create, the signal is shifting.

The next generation of talent will not only be judged by what they say they can do. They will increasingly be recognised by what they can show: A working prototype, a useful workflow, an agent that solves a real problem, a tool that makes something faster, easier, or better.

That is proof of work.

It shows how someone identifies a problem, structures a solution, uses AI, tests an idea, and improves it. For students and early-career professionals, this is becoming a new kind of professional signal, one that resumes alone cannot replicate.

Creating career agents with ChatChat

Christel guided participants through the AI shifts reshaping work and careers in 2026, before moving into the practical principles of agent creation and workflow automation.

The core idea that anchored the session:

"An agent is a workflow with judgment."

A workflow follows a sequence of steps. An agent can understand context, make decisions, and adapt based on what happens next. That distinction matters. It is what moves AI from one-off prompting into systems that can support real, ongoing work.

When connected to a Living Brain within ChatChat, an agent becomes even more powerful. It can draw on memory, context, goals, previous decisions, and accumulated knowledge, working with a richer understanding of the person, task, and environment it is supporting, rather than starting from a blank prompt every time.

This is the shift ChatChat is built around: helping people create agents that are connected to their real lives, their real work, and their real context.

The hackathon challenge

The session kicked off a two-week build challenge for participants. The problem statement was intentionally broad.

Identify a manual, repetitive, or frustrating process in your field of study, work, or daily professional life, and build an AI-powered prototype that helps make it faster, easier, or better.

Participants spent the two weeks that followed developing problem statements, designing solutions, testing prompts, building prototypes, and documenting how they moved from idea to working output. Areas ranged from career planning and research workflows to study tools, productivity systems, interview preparation, and personal knowledge management.

The goal is not perfection. It is the ability to identify a real problem, shape it into a system, and create something useful enough to demonstrate.

Why this matters

The future of careers will not be defined only by who can use AI.

It will be shaped by people who can think with AI, build with AI, and create visible evidence of what they are capable of. This is especially important for students and early-career talent entering a job market where expectations are changing faster than traditional education and hiring signals can keep pace with.

AI fluency is no longer just about knowing which tools to use. It is about understanding how to turn ideas into workflows, workflows into agents, and agents into useful systems that solve real problems.

That is the deeper purpose of the session, not helping participants search for opportunities, but helping them build the evidence of their capability.

The Finals: Today

Today, 26 June, the Trailblazer Camp reaches its Finals, when participants present what they built to LinkedIn leaders, closing out two weeks of agent creation, workflow automation, and AI-powered tool building.

Each submission brings together their problem statements, product descriptions, prompts, build process, iterations, and prototype walkthroughs, creating a record not only of what they built, but how they thought.

At ChatAndBuild, this is the future we are building toward: a world where more people can move from idea to execution, from prompting to systems, and from job search to proof of work.

Thank you to Heather Koh, Pratap Kaul, and Holly Fang at LinkedIn for building a programme that asks more of the next generation and for having us as part of it.

From Job Search to Proof of Work: Creating Career Agents with LinkedIn Trailblazer Camp