Abstract:
Choosing a career is one of the most important decisions that an individual will make
in life. Career decision-making is a complex process. Hence, young students fail to
choose their career path so often. Career uncertainty among students can lead to
several economic and social problems, such as high school or university dropouts,
skills mismatch, unskilled workforce, higher unemployment rate, increased job
mobility etc. Therefore, offering career counselling services within higher education
is important. Unfortunately, providing adequate personalised services of a qualified
career counsellor is a challenging task in developing countries. As a solution, work is
in progress for implementing a career path recommendation system targeting
undergraduates in computing. As an initial step, a systematic literature review was
conducted with the main aim of identifying the factors affecting the career path
success of undergraduates. During the study selection, nine electronic databases were
queried to retrieve a total of 1274 scholarly articles. Then the study selection process
was conducted under three steps, namely, duplicate removal, selection criteria
application for metadata, and selection criteria application for full text. The study
reduction percentage of each of these steps were 22.8%, 91.4% and 67.8%,
respectively. Then eight more studies were selected through snowballing, resulting in
35 scholarly articles for final analysis. As the results of the comprehensive analysis
conducted, it was evident that support for career planning and development is mostly
required by senior secondary or pre-tertiary students. Further, a thorough assessment
of academic performance, knowledge, skills, personality traits, preference, and extracurricular
activities is required during career decision-making. Therefore, in
addressing the practical limitations of traditional career counselling, it is
recommended to utilize the capabilities of computer-assisted career counselling
systems to assist students with their career planning.
