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Top1. Introduction
Career represents one of the major successful millstones achieved by the person in his life (Adekola, 2011). The career choices are highly dependent on their personality traits, activities engaged by individual, behaviourism towards facing challenges and attitudes developed to approach problems (Asanov, 2011; Bimrose, Brown and Barnes, 2005). Particularly, today there is a need to explore the role of guidance and counselling in preparing learners for work from primary to university levels of education (Borchert, 2002; Bublitz, 2013; Chen Lulu, 2002; Firkola, 2005). In developed or underdeveloped nation’s education system designed in such a way that very limited options are available for people. Moreover, it is less supportive in the exploration of new careers or to choose the right one for oneself (Erdogan and Bauer, 2005; Gardner et al., 2011; Frank and Shen, 2016). Today, choosing the wrong career is one of the most important criteria of job dissatisfaction.
The objective of this work is to develop a career path recommendation system for targeted population of higher secondary school (HSS) students. As, the primary issue with HSS students found to be confused while choosing a career path, due to existence of diverse human influential factors like family members, friends, teachers, government or non- government organization (Heckman, 2012; Janger and Nowotny, 2013; Murugami & Nel, 2012). Therefore, better understanding and analysis of diverse career options enhance students to gain better acumen of different types of jobs they would want to explore in future. It is essential for HSS students to get motivated and to develop great knowledge quest through process of good education beforehand of career path selection. Figure 1 shows the influencing factors and its outcome on higher secondary school student career path selection.
Figure 1. Influencing Factors and its outcome on Higher Secondary school student career path selection
Further, HSS students often may be provoked for incorrect choice in deciding their career path due to lack of career experience, guidance, and support from parents, relatives, friends, teachers, career counsellors. Also, HSS students often give away and puzzled while choosing a career path, due to multiple human and environmental factors.
As information technology is evolved and by penetration of mobile, PDA, it is easy for student to access and explore the recommendation system of career on various platforms (Margaret and Norma, 2012). It has become convenient, cost effective solution for those students who are not able to afford proper career counselling to choose the right career due to very high charges of career counsellors.
Several theories are developed on how the career path selection is a key factor which further leads to career development, job satisfaction, career commitment and career developments as shown in Table 1. It is observed that, most of the existing research focuses on recommendation of career path to students of at least undergraduate level. As discussed in (Verma, Sood & Kalra, 2017), very few research and discussions are carried out to study the effectiveness of career recommendation at HSS student’s level.
In this work towards developing career path recommendation system, Holland code theory (Eggerth et al., 2005; Gottfredson et al., 1996) is adapted to solve the objective of focused problem for HSS students. Selection of career is a complex decision-making process in which subjectiveness and imprecision are usually present. So recommendation of career using fuzzy approach is also proposed.