Abstract
Although knowledge economy came with an increased amount of world-wide career opportunities, major difficulties related to knowledge workers' employment have occurred, among them incapacity of choosing the suitable career. Usually, careers (jobs, occupations) are determined by education, either formal or informal. When a student enrolls to a faculty, he/she in fact makes the first step in choosing one's career. Unfortunately, in Romania, more than a quarter of the students enrolled in a graduate or master program do not finish their studies. This translates into no-return-on-investment for the Romanian government regarding the money spent on the incomplete schooling of so many undecided youths. The career counselling centers, which could diminish the drop-out problem, are under-financed and under-staffed, as one councilor provides such programs for 3400 students, while in high schools a counselor activates for approximative 800 pupils, according to public statistics. In Romania, the university drop-out rate increases from year to year, especially in engineering programs, which are harder, and less known to pupils, conducting to a lack of skilled personnel in the corresponding domains in industry. In the light of the above observations, the scope of the article is to propose a technological model for a Smart Career Path Profiling System (CPPS) with the aim of providing career counseling and recommendations based on advanced analytics of users' profile, extracted automatically from various data sources, e.g. the school situation, social media profiles, specific answers etc. CPPSs are not a new thing. Usually they are built based on psychometric instruments and psychological tests. Unfortunately, these tests are time-consuming and don't take into consideration all aspects of a person behavior. As a follow-up of the technological opportunities, researchers have tried to improve the CPPSs by exploiting recommendation algorithms, data mining techniques and social media technologies: a new generation of CPPSs occurred. Our model is based on recent technologies and customized for Romanian environment and for engineering domains and presented in the context of the new generation of CPPSs. |