A career guide decision support system: The Birkman approach

Abstract

In today‟s world, knowledge is the currency of doing things. To be relevant in any area of life it is therefore imperative to pursue a career in which one will find fulfilment. However, how would individuals know where their strength lies in terms of carrer pursuit and fulfilment? This paper, therefore, proposes a Web-based Decision Support System (WbDSS) that can assist individuals in deciding what career path to pursue considering their strength, drawing on the conception of Birkman method. The paper provides the designs of the WbDSS using the unified modelling language tool, which was implemented using Web-based technologies like hyper text mark-up language, cascading style sheets, JavaScript, hyper text pre-processor, and MySQL database for the backend and client data storehouse. The system showed the possibility of either affirming or dismissing the choice of career in the mind of users considering the result from the Alpha testing carried out on the system. In future, we seek to pursue a more inferentially robust system that will be able to tell a user which career to specifically pursue. Interestingly, career is a lifelong phenomenon that leads to a life of fulfillment. However, this was not estimated nor catered for in the proposed system.

Keywords: Web-based decision support system, Web-based technologies, the Birkman method, the Unified modelling language tool, Alpha and Beta testing, MySQL database.