EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Career choice is a complex decision for high school students due to the impacts it will have on the career of an individual. In most occasions students trying to match their career choices to their abilities and talent lack the platform to do so. Career choice is a challenging trend that is witnessed globally. Many high school students end up choosing the wrong career in the matric due to lack of information of what the career entails. As such most choices are based on the preference of the parents and other external factors that does not reflect on the capabilities and talent of the applicant. The use of web applications is aimed at helping high school students make an informed decision on the necessary requirements, past and current statistics of the career, the institutions it offers among others. This proposal aims to lay the foundation for development of a web application that will integrate available data to help the applicant make an informed choice. It will outline the modalities of current research basing on the challenges affecting high school students in navigating the career ladder.
SCOPE
The advent of post industrial revolution and the emergence of information technology has shaped the way career choices are made. In the early days career choice was the preserve of parents and the community. However industrialization and post industrialization advances have made it possible to have career planning as well as career research before one decides on the way to take. This is so because of the dynamic socio-economic conditions and the job market. Information technology has impacted positively on the speed and magnitude of transferring information from one party to the other across the world. Therefore information speed has been improved significantly.
Despite the incentives and investments pursued by governments and individuals in post secondary education, a significant percentage of post secondary education graduates find themselves in job environments that does not commensurate with their skills and capabilities. Therefore there is need to provide accurate and reliable information on the labour markets before young people make their decisions about career choices. This proposal researches on the web-based tools that can be helpful in boosting the confidence of high school graduates on their ability to reach informed career choices.
BACKGROUND
Past publications on the effectiveness of web-based applications on student career choices reveal considerable results. For instance data from the Canadian Follow Up of Graduates survey indicated that there is huge disparities between the respondents current job specifications and their academic qualifications. One third of graduates are found to be employed in completely different professions in respect to their university and college degrees.
The mismatch between graduates education and employment is responsible for the costly and insufficient use of resources. This is evident in the rate of change of courses and field of study in colleges and universities by fresh student who did not understand their respective choices at the point of filling the matric (Eberts., 2004). This trend amounts to waste of resources and time on the part of the applicant and the institution of learning. According to (Lakhani, 2009) University graduates who hold a job that is concurrent with education backgrounds are more likely to an additional 24-30% of their income. The value doubles up to more than 44% for those who hold more than a bachelors degree.
DELIVERABLES
The aim of this research is to develop an application that will leverage between the available information in the job market and the career choices made by high school student. Prudent career choice is important because apart from the social and financial gains, the correct career leads to a self-fulfilled individual who is generally satisfied in serving humanity.
In order to benefit from the advances of technology, there is need to develop applications that can be integrated with the normal way of life. Face book for instance have improved the social interactions between people sharing the same backgrounds. Likewise, LinkedIn has revolutionalized the way professional interact with each other and with prospective employees (Gary B. Shelly, 2010).
The use of web applications improves the way people interact in the world. In the high school student scenario, it is important because it will review past credentials about a certain career giving the applicant an informed choice free of reservations and stereotypes common in society. The application will have a database that documents the profiles of other professionals in the same line. Right away from the university, the application will classify graduating individuals and have a timeline that tracks their careers for the rest of their lives. With a kind of data segregation, the application will narrow down the classification into community and village level. A high school graduate seeking to go to college will have all the information of all the individuals that have pursued the same career and their current status of employment (Elsevier).
APPLICATION INTERFACE
METHODS
In order to handle the need for a web application that addresses the problems of young people in respect to career choice, the research will conduct a study of the impacts of such an application on the effectiveness of career choice in high school students. A prototype will be used for the research and post secondary education graduates will be recruited randomly. Participant signed in for the project will be allowed access to the prototype website that will enable them to understand their present situation and access the impacts of the custom made application. Various stakeholders from different domains will be involved in the development of the prototype. This will include career counselors, web developers, and database and security consultants among others. Participants will be recruited through a voluntary process and assigned a web portal group or a comparison group. The comparison group will serve as counterfactuals, providing unbiased response to the effects of the application. The research project is expected to take a significant and realistic period of time in order to yield factual results.
COSTS ESTIMATION
The project cost is estimated to cover research and analysis, application development, implementation and support. The estimated cost can be classified as follows;
IMPACTS OF THE APPLICATION TO LEARNING INSTITUTIONS
Web-based application will provide a number of advantages over career forums and seminars. It has a low marginal cost in outputting information to large number of people in a simultaneous manner. In addition, it has the capability to store numerous amounts of information and permit the user to retrieve the information at their own convenience. With the advent in mobile computing, the application will be useful to numerous high school graduates through their Smartphone’s. The information database is also very dynamic and can be updated by the user in real time thereby outputting only relevant and usable information. With collaboration with learning institutions, the career analysis tool will receive wide distribution with high school graduates on the verge of joining college (Darlington, 2010).
CONCLUSION
The proposal has deliberated on the causes of wrong career choice among young people and the implications it will have on their future life. The internet has opened up massive opportunities for sharing, storage and use of information useful for decision making purposes. This applies to managers, job seekers and career researches alike. Many high school graduates are facing the problem of finding, navigating, prioritizing and analyzing the information found on the internet effectively for sound decision making purposes. This work is laying the foundation for the development of a web-based application that will provide up to date and relevant information on the career choices available for high school graduates. Through this project, high school graduates will have simplified and segregated information on the career of their choice pinned down to village and community level (Carroll, 2003). The application will analyze past data based on various attributes such as geographical locations, institution, year and gender. In addition, it will provide a detailed report on the record of all those individuals who pursued the same line of career, their college completion and graduation rate, sector of employment and their current status. In this age of internet and technological advances, it is essential to have an application that sorts and simplify numerous information on the web and display only the relevant information at the convenience of the user (Alan Dennis, 2008).
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