Yerbol Sarmurzin, Askar Azhenov, Ainash Kudysheva
et al.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming university career services, shifting from traditional predictive algorithms to interactive generative agents. This transition raises critical questions about student agency and the digital platformisation of career guidance. In this systematic review, we examined empirical evaluations and technical architectures of AI implementations in higher education career counselling from 2015 to 2025. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, we identified 43 studies across Web of Science, Scopus, and ERIC. Methodologically, we appraised study quality using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT) and conducted a thematic narrative synthesis. We identified three main AI implementation typologies: (1) Generative Chatbots offering scalable 24/7 support, though limited by user trust barriers and a lack of perceived empathy; (2) Predictive Analytics forecasting employability, which require transparent, explainable models; and (3) Recommender Ecosystems that match students to personalized career pathways using institutional data. Interpreting these empirical findings through Career Construction Theory and Platformisation, we highlight a tension between technological efficiency and student agency. While AI expands information access, over-reliance on opaque algorithms introduces the risk of “automation bias,” where students passively accept recommendations rather than actively constructing their vocational identities. We conclude that AI should augment, rather than replace, human counsellors within a hybrid support model. Future research should prioritize longitudinal evaluations of AI interventions, algorithmic audits of recommender platforms, and the development of Explainable AI (XAI) to foster critical AI literacy.
Rommel Gutierrez, A. Navarro, W. Villegas-Ch.
et al.
This study explores the use of a serious game integrating the RIASEC Test within an interactive narrative for vocational guidance. The game generates dynamic, personalized scenarios in real time using artificial intelligence, enhancing engagement and authenticity. Implemented with 200 students from high school and university levels, the study evaluated its effectiveness through satisfaction surveys, qualitative interviews, and pregame and postgame responses. Results showed high satisfaction (4.2–4.5 on a five-point Likert scale) and a significant correlation between game responses and academic performance, aligning vocational interests with academic strengths. These findings demonstrate the potential of serious games to personalize career guidance and support comprehensive student development.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education represents a critical avenue for cultivating talent in scientific and technological innovation, playing a pivotal role in national economic development and social advancement. Enhancing university students' interest in STEM careers can strengthen the foundation of STEM education and bridge individual educational experiences with national development imperatives. This study, based on a survey of 1497 science and engineering students at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, examines the factors influencing students' interests in STEM careers from both individual and environmental perspectives. The analysis reveals six key challenges confronting STEM development in Tanzania: occupational gender bias, dual imbalances between STEM academic disciplines and the needs of the industrial sector, lack of vocational guidance within families, disparities in educational access between urban and rural areas, high barriers to entry into STEM specializations, and academic burnout. To overcome these challenges, a coordinated approach involving family engagement, institutional support, and broader social collaboration is necessary to promote the development of STEM talent and support Tanzania's industrialization efforts.
This study examined the functioning of guidance and counselling centres in public universities of Ghana, focusing on the services provided to students and teaching staff. A descriptive survey design was employed. Stratified random sampling was used to group the 15 public universities into three zones. The lottery method was used to select the universities in each zone. All counsellors (42) from the selected universities form the sample. Data was collected through a 57-item questionnaire, covering vocational, educational, and social/personal guidance, use of time, counselling tools, online counselling, and record-keeping practices. The major findings revealed that counsellors provided comprehensive support, including vocational guidance on career skills and job information, educational counselling on scholarships and curriculum guidance, and social/personal support for personality development and interpersonal relationships. Most counsellors utilised traditional face-to-face counselling, with limited engagement in online counselling due to unreliable internet infrastructure. Counsellors effectively used various counselling techniques and maintained records of sessions. While guidance and counselling centres are functioning well, there are areas for improvement, particularly in enhancing online counselling services and implementing standardised digital record-keeping systems. Implications for government of Ghana, university authorities, and guidance and counselling units include improving internet access, organising frequent vocational and educational seminars, and investing in counsellor training to support better students and teaching staff academic and personal development.
The topic of aging decline on performance of NBA players has been discussed in this study. The autoencoder with K-means clustering machine learning method was adopted to career trend classification of NBA players, and the LSTM deep learning method was adopted in performance prediction of each NBA player. The dataset was collected from the basketball game data of veteran NBA players. The contribution of the work performed better than the other methods with generalization ability for evaluating various types of NBA career trend, and can be applied in different types of sports in the field of sport analytics.
We present a large-scale analysis of career mobility of college-educated U.S. workers using online resume profiles to investigate how gender, race, and job change options are associated with upward mobility. This study addresses key research questions of how the job changes affect their upward career mobility, and how the outcomes of upward career mobility differ by gender and race. We address data challenges -- such as missing demographic attributes, missing wage data, and noisy occupation labels -- through various data processing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. In particular, we develop a large language models (LLMs) based occupation classification method known as FewSOC that achieves accuracy significantly higher than the original occupation labels in the resume dataset. Analysis of 228,710 career trajectories reveals that intra-firm occupation change has been found to facilitate upward mobility most strongly, followed by inter-firm occupation change and inter-firm lateral move. Women and Black college graduates experience significantly lower returns from job changes than men and White peers. Multilevel sensitivity analyses confirm that these disparities are robust to cluster-level heterogeneity and reveal additional intersectional patterns.
Debates about whether development projects improve living conditions persist, partly because observational estimates can be biased by incomplete adjustment and because reliable outcome data are scarce at the neighborhood level. We address both issues in a continent-scale, sector-specific evaluation of Chinese and World Bank projects across 9,899 neighborhoods in 36 African countries (2002-2013), representative of ~88% of the population. First, we use a recent dataset that measures living conditions with a machine-learned wealth index derived from contemporaneous satellite imagery, yielding a consistent panel of 6.7 km square mosaics. Second, to strengthen identification, we proxy officials' map-based placement criteria using pre-treatment daytime satellite images and fuse these with tabular covariates to estimate funder- and sector-specific ATEs via inverse-probability weighting. Incorporating imagery often shrinks effects relative to tabular-only models. On average, both donors raise wealth, with larger and more consistent gains for China; sector extremes in our sample include Trade and Tourism (330) for the World Bank (+12.29 IWI points), and Emergency Response (700) for China (+15.15). Assignment-mechanism analyses also show World Bank placement is often more predictable from imagery alone (as well as from tabular covariates). This suggests that Chinese project placements are more driven by non-visible, political, or event-driven factors than World Bank placements. To probe residual concerns about selection on observables, we also estimate within-neighborhood (unit) fixed-effects models at a spatial resolution about 67 times finer than prior fixed-effects analyses, leveraging the computer-vision-imputed IWI panels; these deliver smaller but, for Chinese projects, directionally consistent effects.
: The stage of vocational education, during which the students gradually develop social roles, is key to their growth. Thus, teachers should realize the importance of ideological and political education in higher vocational mathematics courses, continuously exploring the feasibility of the courses , in order to foster virtue, cultivate talents and meanwhile combine value guidance, knowledge imparting, and competence cultivation. This allows students, by learning, to develop the ability to master the laws of development, understand principles, enrich knowledge, and expand horizons, consequently shaping their personalities. The integration of ideological and political elements into higher vocational mathematics teaching is of great significance in the growth of students' life, mathematics learning and career development. Also, the implementation of ideological and political education in higher vocational mathematics has unique advantages in the aspects of taking history as a mirror, inspiring talents, and understanding facts. In order to improve the timeliness of such integration, it is proposed to establish and enrich the dynamic resource base of ideological and political elements, lay out corresponding ideological and political elements along the main line of mathematics teaching, and expand the coverage of ideological and political education in higher vocational mathematics curriculum.
The current research developed the Career Guidance Chatbot (CGC-bot) that collects high-quality, diverse work preference information from users, and the subsequent twenty Natural Language Processing (NLP) + Machine Learning (ML) algorithm-powered machines that predict basic interest scores from user’s chat with the CGC-bot, and searches for top O*NET occupations based on user’s basic interest profile prediction. We evaluate the consistency and performance of text embeddings generated from various NLP models as predictors for basic interest scores, and we evaluate the psychometric properties of machine-predicted interest scores. 1250 U.S. adults and 328 college students were recruited from Prolific and the course credit participant pool (SONA) at a large midwestern university to complete a two-part study that is spaced one week apart, where one part is chatting with the CGC-bot and the other is to complete a basic interest survey. A total of 1176 participants finished both parts of the study and were included in our analyses. Results suggested that there is good consistency across interest score prediction patterns from machines built on various groups of text embeddings, and machine-predicted scores shared comparable psychometric properties as self-reported scores. On the other hand, machine-predicted and self-report interest scores showed lower monotrait-heteromethod correlations (r = .20 - .54) than those found between interest inventories. It is also notable that participants enjoyed the chatbot less due to its higher mental demand and longer interaction time.Together, these tools integrate recent advancements in technology with vocational interest research for improving real-world applications of interest measurement and the study sets a benchmark for future studies that aim to measure vocational interests with chat-based text data.
Milanović-Dobrota Biljana Z., Mentus-Kandić Tatjana S., Buha Nataša S.
Introduction. Parents are the primary source of advice, information, and mediation in children's career development. For persons with intellectual disabilities, parental support is necessary during all stages of career development, and it is especially important in the period of vocational education. Objectives. The main goal of the paper was to determine how students with intellectual disabilities perceived their parents' support during education for a chosen occupation, with special attention to some factors of the family and school environments. Methodes. The sample consisted of 155 participants with mild intellectual disability undergoing professional training in schools for students with developmental disabilities. The Career-Related Parental Support Scale was used in the research. It was designed to assess adolescent perceptions of parental support across the domains of instrumental assistance, emotional support, verbal encouragement, and career-related modeling. Results. In the sample as a whole, the participants perceived the greatest parental support in the domain of verbal encouragement and the least in career-related modeling. Greater support from their parents in career development was perceived by those who lived in a family environment with both parents, as well as those whose parents were more educated, compared to students of senior classes and those who achieved excellent results, while no differences were found in relation to the gender. Conclusion. The analysis of the obtained results indicated certain deficiencies in the field of career guidance and counseling of students with intellectual disabilities. The obtained findings point to the need to improve cooperation with students' families in this field and empower them in relation to the ways in which they can contribute to the career success of children. Also, the necessity of expanding knowledge in the field of career development for a deeper understanding of the key problems in this field was highlighted.
Success in sports is a complex phenomenon that has only garnered limited research attention. In particular, we lack a deep scientific understanding of success in sports like tennis and the factors that contribute to it. Here, we study the unfolding of tennis players' careers to understand the role of early career stages and the impact of specific tournaments on players' trajectories. We employ a comprehensive approach combining network science and analysis of ATP tournament data and introduce a novel method to quantify tournament prestige based on the eigenvector centrality of the co-attendance network of tournaments. Focusing on the interplay between participation in central tournaments and players' performance, we find that the level of the tournament where players achieve their first win is associated with becoming a top player. This work sheds light on the critical role of the initial stages in the progression of players' careers, offering valuable insights into the dynamics of success in tennis.
This research paper adopts a methodology by conducting a thorough literature review to uncover the essential prerequisites for achieving a prosperous career in the field of Information Security (IS). The primary objective is to increase public awareness regarding the diverse opportunities available in the Information Security (IS) field. The initial search involved scouring four prominent academic databases using the specific keywords "cybersecurity" and "skills," resulting in the identification of a substantial corpus of 1,520 articles. After applying rigorous screening criteria, a refined set of 31 relevant papers was selected for further analysis. Thematic analysis was conducted on these studies to identify and delineate the crucial knowledge and skills that an IS professional should possess. The research findings emphasize the significant time investment required for individuals to acquire the necessary technical proficiency in the cybersecurity domain. Furthermore, the study recognizes the existence of gender-related obstacles for women pursuing cybersecurity careers due to the field's unique requirements. It suggests that females can potentially overcome these barriers by initially entering the profession at lower levels and subsequently advancing based on individual circumstances.
روند جهانیشدن، افزایش جمیعت و نیاز روزافزون به محصولات کشاورزی سبز، اتخاذ رویکردهای نوین در بخش کشاورزی را بیشازپیش نمایان میکند. در این میان زنجیره تأمین سبز در نظام کشاورزی میتواند نقش کلیدی در کاهش فقر و امنیت غذایی در کشورهای در حال توسعه ایفا کند. بر همین اساس در پژوهش حاضر تلاش گردید نقشه راهی برای مدیریت زنجیره تأمین سبز در نظام کشاورزی کشور با دو رویکرد کیفی و کمّی ترسیم گردد. جامعه آماری در مرحله کیفی 30 نفر از خبرگان، اساتید دانشگاه، مدیران جهاد کشاورزی و فعالان محیطزیست استان اردبیل که به روش هدفمند (نمونهگیری نظری)، با روش ارجاع زنجیرهای (روش گلولهبرفی) انتخاب و در بخش کمّی، کارشناسان سازمانهای جهاد کشاورزی و محیطزیست که مطابق جدول مورگان تعداد 181نفر به عنوان نمونه آماری و بر اساس روش نمونهگیری تصادفی طبقهای مورد مطالعه قرار گرفتند. گردآوری اطّلاعات در مرحله اول، مصاحبههای عمیق و نیمهساختاریافته و در مرحله دوّم پرسشنامه محقّقساخته (بازطراحیشده) با پاسخ بسته (طیف لیکرت) بود که بر اساس شاخصهای مستخرج از مرحله اول تنظیم گردیده است. مجموعه دادههای بدستآمده بعد از طی فرآیند مستمر کدگذاریهای باز، محوری و گزینشی و استفاده از نرمافزار MaxQDA، در قالب 126کدِ باز، 71مفهوم، 20مقوله و 6طبقه بر اساس رویکرد سامانمند سازماندهی شدند. بر اساس نتایج حاصل از پژوهش و خروجی نرمافزار Smatr PLS، شاخص "حضور سازمانهای تولیدکننده سبز در همایش و نمایشگاهها" با ضریب مسیر 896/0 و شاخص "بخشبندی بر اساس گروههای سنی" با ضریب مسیر 866/0 بعنوان مهتمرین و اثرگذارترین شاخصها در نقشه راه طراحیشده شناسایی شدند.
Vocational guidance. Career development, Agriculture (General)
En el marco de la investigación Desafíos de la orientación vocacional en diversos contextos laborales de profesionales de orientación en Costa Rica, fase II, desarrollada en el año 2021, el presente artículo destaca los retos y desafíos que enfrentan las personas profesionales en Orientación desde los diversos contextos laborales de índole público, entre ellos: Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje, Ministerio de Educación Pública en I, II, III ciclo y Educación Diversificada, Ministerio de Justicia y Paz, Patronato Nacional de la Infancia y el Sistema Universitario Estatal. La metodología del estudio se desarrolló bajo el paradigma naturalista con enfoque cualitativo y método de análisis fenomenológico, y para la recolección de la información se aplicó la técnica de entrevista y se desarrolló un taller investigativo. Con la información recopilada se procede a la organización y transcripción por medio del programa Atlas Ti, permitiendo la triangulación de los datos (entrevistas, el taller investigativo y la conceptualización teórica de cada contexto), y el análisis de la información; obteniendo entre los principales resultados, que el uso de las herramientas tecnológicas representa un desafío para la población del estudio. Por otra parte, existe la necesidad de actualización constante, y el aprender acerca de los diversos paradigmas, enfoques y teorías, específicamente las relacionadas a las nuevas tendencias de la disciplina (entre ellas el life desing [diseño de vida]), así como la obtención de estrategias para atender los actuales retos de la revolución 4.0. son parte de los desafíos que indican los profesionales de la disciplina.
In this work, we investigate the phenomenon of Author-UnificAtion (AUA), which describes the high structural similarity of two co-authoring engineers that share the same forename, surname, institution, and academic career without being related by blood. So far, prior work has only explored similar surnames and institutions. On top of that, we elaborate on the additional author similarity of sharing the same academic career as a Ph.D. candidate with the same starting day and month included in the university contract. We show that our work outperforms previous state-of-the-art investigations, among others by providing a higher Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) of the letters in our names and in our institution. Lastly, we prove the duality of our identities through a qualitative evaluation.
James Paul Mason, Robert G. Begbie, Maitland Bowen
et al.
In the next decade, there is an opportunity for very high return on investment of relatively small budgets by elevating the priority of smallsat funding in heliophysics. We've learned in the past decade that these missions perform exceptionally well by traditional metrics, e.g., papers/year/\$M (Spence et al. 2022 -- arXiv:2206.02968). It is also well established that there is a "leaky pipeline" resulting in too little diversity in leadership positions (see the National Academies Report at https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/increasing-diversity-in-the-leadership-of-competed-space-missions). Prioritizing smallsat funding would significantly increase the number of opportunities for new leaders to learn -- a crucial patch for the pipeline and an essential phase of career development. At present, however, there are far more proposers than the available funding can support, leading to selection ratios that can be as low as 6% -- in the bottom 0.5th percentile of selection ratios across the history of ROSES. Prioritizing SmallSat funding and substantially increasing that selection ratio are the fundamental recommendations being made by this white paper.
We examine the innovation of researchers with long-lived careers in Computer Science and Physics. Despite the epistemological differences between such disciplines, we consistently find that a researcher's most innovative publication occurs earlier than expected if innovation were distributed at random across the sequence of publications in their career, and is accompanied by a peak year in which researchers publish other work which is more innovative than average. Through a series of linear models, we show that the innovation achieved by a researcher during their peak year is higher when it is preceded by a long period of low productivity. These findings are in stark contrast with the dynamics of academic impact, which researchers are incentivised to pursue through high productivity and incremental - less innovative - work by the currently prevalent paradigms of scientific evaluation.
En este ensayo se presentan los principales postulados de la teoría de construcción de carrera y el paradigma de diseño de vida propuestos por Mark L. Savickas. Además, se comentan varias de las críticas que recibe este enfoque. Por ejemplo, el hecho de que responde a una realidad contextual diferente a la latinoamericana, con una lógica de capital humano que fomenta la individualización y que a su vez se plantea para ser utilizada en orientación individual únicamente. Posteriormente, se propone una manera de aplicar los principales postulados del paradigma del diseño de vida a la orientación vocacional de grupos en contextos latinoamericanos. Para ello, al discurso narrativo que presenta este paradigma se puede complementar con el discurso crítico y emancipador de la pedagogía crítica de Paulo Freire. De esta forma, la perspectiva individualista que caracteriza al mundo posmoderno puede ser contrarrestada por medio de un discurso solidario y de transformación social. Además, el promover experiencias culturales que amplíen la cosmovisión de las personas estudiantes colabora a configurar narrativas vocacionales positivas que pueden favorecer la vivencia de vocaciones que busquen ir más allá de las realidades de injusticia social que caracterizan a las sociedades latinoamericanas. Para esto, se parte de una visión amplia de carrera que incluye no solo trayectorias educativas y ocupaciones laborales, sino además voluntariados, compromisos sociales y familiares que la persona desempeña a lo largo de su trayectoria vital.
امروزه جوانان روستایی تمایل چندانی به استقرار در روستاها و اشتغال به فعالیت های کشاورزی ندارند، این در حالی است که آینده توسعه کشاورزی هر کشوری متکی به جوانان روستایی است. با توجه به اهمیت اشتغال جوانان روستایی به حرفه کشاورزی، این تحقیق کیفی با هدف واکاوی دلایل کاهش تمایل جوانان روستایی به شغل کشاورزی انجام شد. جامعه تحقیق را جوانان روستایی دهستان چله شهرستان گیلانغرب تشکیل دادند. ابزار اصلی گردآوری داده ها، مصاحبه عمیق با جوانان روستایی بود که از طریق نمونه گیری هدفمند و با روش گلوله برفی انتخاب شدند. تجزیه و تحلیل داده های گردآوری شده به روش تحلیل محتوا و با استفاده از نرم افزار MAX-QDA12، منجر به شناسایی 32 مفهوم در قالب 5 مقوله اصلی شد؛ بر این اساس، مهم ترین دلایل کاهش تمایل جوانان روستایی به شغل کشاورزی شامل 1) ﻣﺨﺎﻃﺮﻩﭘﺬﻳﺮﻱ ﺑﺎﻻﯼ شغل کشاورزی، 2) درآمد پایین و دشواری حرفه کشاورزی، 3) نگرش منفی نسبت به روستا، 4) کمبود امکانات بهداشتی، درمانی و رفاهی در روستا و 5) نبود تسهیلات اعتباری کافی در بخش کشاورزی بود. یافتـه هـای تحقیق بیانگـر این واقعیت بـود که جوانان روسـتایی، مشـاغل غیـر کشـاورزی را بـر کشـاورزی ترجیـح مـی دهنـد کـه شـاید دلیل آن، سـودآوری بـالا و راحتی آن مشـاغل باشد. لـذا، ضروری به نظر می رسد با برنامه ریزی های منسجم و مناسب به ارتقای کیفیت زندگی در مناطق روستایی کمک نمود که خود می تواند باعث افزایش حس تعلق، مشارکت، سرمایه گذاری، توسعه کارآفرینی و سرزندگی در محیط روستا شود.
Vocational guidance. Career development, Agriculture (General)