Bridging education and employment: a digital career guidance ecosystem for Sri Lankan youth

Abstract

Sri Lanka faces a persistent challenge of making youth ready for employment through reading labor market signals, aligning personal preferences, and assessing career aptitude. A systematic career guidance ecosystem is needed to bridge the gap between the education system, the labor market expectations, and the individuals’ career preferences. Given the importance of proper career guidance and career counselling and more importantly, the paucity of such facilities in Sri Lanka, this action research proposes a comprehensive system- NextStep, a web-based career guidance and career counselling platform. The research objectives are twofold as developing a prototype of a digital career guidance ecosystem and expanding social learning theory to today’s ICT driven world. It features aptitude assessment, course exploration, and professional career counselling facilities targeting informed career decision-making by the youth. Agile software development methodology is used for iterative feedback and continuous improvement. The microservices-based architecture built on ReactJS for the frontend and Spring Boot with MySQL at the backend ensure future scalability and maintainability, and system security. The key functions of the system are role-based access control, career preference identification quizzes, course search, chatbot to recommend career opportunities, and facilities to meet professional career counsellors. NextStep is developed after studying existing local solutions, which do not serve the purpose of inclusive career guidance, instead acting as information catalogs. This research has demonstrated how IT-driven interventions help prepare youth for more informed career decisions and minimize career frustration and skill mismatch. Authors believe that the system usability can be further improved if a mobile application is integrated. This research invites national educational authorities to implement it country-wide after scaling it up, mapping national educational policies and taking into consideration the IT literacy and resource distribution of the country.