Overview
Nearly everyone has opened ChatGPT, typed a question, and gotten an answer that was fine but forgettable. The distance between that and using ChatGPT to save real hours every week is skill: understanding what it is good at, briefing it properly, checking its work, and knowing which of its many tools to reach for. ChatGPT is the broadest of the popular assistants, and that breadth is exactly what makes it easy to use shallowly and hard to use well.
This is a hands-on, foundation course. It assumes no technical background and deliberately teaches a small set of skills that compound rather than touring every feature. The gradient starts with an accurate mental model of what ChatGPT is, moves to the core skill of asking well, then applies that skill to writing, to analyzing your own documents and spreadsheets, and to building reusable tools like Custom GPTs, and finishes with the habits that keep your use safe and consistent. Every module includes a hands-on lab and builds on the one before, and you will work on tasks from your own job throughout.
Who Should Attend
- Knowledge workers in any role who want real productivity gains from ChatGPT
- Managers and individual contributors whose work is heavy on writing, email, documents, and spreadsheets
- Teams standardizing on ChatGPT and wanting a shared baseline of skill
Attendees whose organization runs on Microsoft 365 may prefer Everyday AI: Boosting Productivity with Microsoft Copilot or Getting Value from Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Prerequisites
- None. No technical background is assumed
- Access to ChatGPT (a free account works, though some features shown require a paid plan) and a few real work tasks to practice on
What You'll Be Able to Do
- Set custom instructions and compare how much they sharpen ChatGPT's output on a real task
- Rewrite weak prompts into clear briefs that get genuinely useful answers
- Take a real document from rough notes to a polished draft with ChatGPT
- Analyze a spreadsheet and a document with ChatGPT, and verify the key claims before relying on them
- Build and test a reusable Custom GPT for a recurring task from your own job
- Judge what is safe to share with ChatGPT and set your own usage habits
Course Outline
Day one: the fundamentals of working with ChatGPT
- Meet ChatGPT
- What ChatGPT is, in plain language, and how its models, memory, and custom instructions fit together
- Strengths, limits, and hallucination: why confident answers can still be wrong
- Lab: run a real work task through ChatGPT, then set custom instructions and compare the difference
- Asking Well: The Core Skill
- The briefing mindset: goal, context, and the format you want back
- Treating the chat as a working conversation, not a search box
- Lab: take three weak prompts from real tasks and rewrite them until the answers are genuinely useful
- Writing and Editing
- Drafting emails and documents from rough notes
- Rewriting for tone, audience, and length, then editing and proofreading
- Lab: take a real document from rough notes to a polished draft with ChatGPT
Day two: analysis, reusable tools, and working safely
- Analyzing Documents and Data
- Summarizing long documents and extracting what matters
- Advanced Data Analysis: asking questions of a spreadsheet and getting charts without formulas
- The verification habit: checking claims and numbers before you rely on them
- Lab: upload a spreadsheet and a document, analyze both, then verify the key claims
- Building Reusable Tools
- Memory and custom instructions: teaching ChatGPT how you work
- Custom GPTs: packaging a recurring task into a reusable assistant
- Lab: build and test a Custom GPT for a recurring task from your own job
- Working Safely and Well
- What you should and should not paste into ChatGPT
- Company policy, confidentiality, and common-sense guardrails
- Lab: judge a set of realistic scenarios as safe or unsafe, then finalize your personal usage habits
Extended Version
The three-day version keeps the same gradient and adds depth and practice:
- Voice and image generation for everyday tasks, and when they actually help
- A role-based workshop day applying the skills to each attendee's specific job
- Prompts and Custom GPTs that hold up over time, connecting to Prompt Writing for Business Users
- A capstone in which each attendee builds, documents, and demonstrates a complete personal ChatGPT workflow