ECTRS: A personalised early career trajectory recommender system for youths

Choosing a career pathway to pursue can be daunting for many youths. However, it is challenging for them when they lack exposure to career knowledge and do not understand whether a particular career suits them. Without proper career guidance, youths are at risk of poor career choices, which lead to career dissatisfaction that can inevitably cause damage to one's health and quality of work. In this paper, we aim to design an Early Career Trajectory Recommender System (ECTRS) to solve youths' career pathway uncertainty and support them in kick-starting their Information Technology career journey. The ECTRS uses the Occupational Information Network (O∗NET) database to generate similar Information on Technology careers for youths based on their personality and interest. The efficacy of the ECTRS was evaluated on 22 university students, all pursuing Information Technology-related courses. The results show that participants agreed with the relevance of the generated career recommendations compared to their actual career goals. Participants also agreed that they were able to discover new types of Information Technology careers. It shows the capabilities of the ECTRS in guiding youths to the right Information Technology career path, thus, allowing them to make well-informed decisions. The demo of the proposed framework is publicly available at https://recsysv4.herokuapp.com/. Copyright © 2022 IEEE.