DEVELOPMENT OF A WEB-BASED INTELLIGENT CAREER GUIDANCE SYSTEM FOR PRE-TERTIARY SCIENCE STUDENTS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The traditional approach to career path guidance, counselling and recommendation is a manual method that has been observed to be ineffective and inefficient as a result of factors like scarcity of human career counselors, non-accessibility to human career counselors at anytime and anywhere, human career counselor inadequate knowledge and information about new fields of study, decrease in human career counselor’s reasoning speed and efficiency. As a way of finding solution to the above factors, the electronic or computerized approach provides an alternative, effective and efficient career path guidance, counselling and recommendation. This research therefore developed a cross-platform and responsive web-based intelligent career guidance system, an expert system that assists and supports pre-tertiary science students in Nigeria to independently choose a career path at anytime, anywhere with the use of computer system (desktop, laptop, mobile/smart phones) as applicants seek admission into various accredited fields of study in Nigerian Higher Institutions (Universities or Polytechnics). The data and knowledge for the development of the expert system were obtained through primary source (interview with human career counselor and universities/polytechnics admission officers) and secondary source (journals, internet, and textbooks). The expert system uses student-driven parameters such as favourite science subjects combination, career interest inventory analysis result, and intelligent quotient test result for right career path recommendation. The web-based intelligent system was designed and implemented with operational principle of a rule-based expert system using forward chaining algorithm, the client-side/user/web interface pages (front-end) were designed, created, developed, encoded and implemented using “Bootstrap 3” front-end framework for cross-platform and responsiveness. The “Bootstrap 3” contains HTML5 (Hyper Text Markup Language), CSS3 (Cascade Style Sheet), and JavaScript. For the back-end, XAMPP was used as web server with support for PHP as a scripting language and MySQL for working memory functional database. The system was implemented, tested and evaluated using a sample of 200 pre-tertiary science students; they registered and took the career choice tests and asked them to provide their valuable feedback for the purpose of evaluating the system performance. The result of the students’ feedback shows that the recommended career by the system is 95% accurate and relevant, 70% satisfactory, and 80% adequacy of information provided on career guidance by the system.