A Machine Learning Approach to Career Path Choice for Information Technology Graduates

H Al-Dossari,A Alqahtani,F A Nughaymish,M Alkahlifah,Z Al-Qahtani

doi:10.48084/etasr.3821

H Al-Dossari, A Alqahtani + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.48084/etasr.3821

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Abstract

Enterprises rely more and more on well-qualified and highly specialized IT professionals. Although the increasing availability of IT jobs is a good indicator for IT graduates, they nonetheless may find themselves confused about the most appropriate career for their future. In this paper, a recommendation system called CareerRec is proposed, which uses machine learning algorithms to help IT graduates select a career path based on their skills. CareerRec was trained and tested using a dataset of 2255 employees in the IT sector in Saudi Arabia. We conducted a performance comparison between five machine learning algorithms to assess their accuracy for predicting the best-suited career path among 3 classes. Our experiments demonstrate that the XGBoost algorithm outperforms other models and gives the highest accuracy (70.47%).

Highlights

Information Technology (IT) jobs continue to grow in several disciplines, such as cloud computing, cyber security, mobile applications and big data analytics [1]
We propose CareerRec, a recommendation system that relies on machine learning algorithms to help IT graduates choose their future career
The results revealed that the random forest algorithm performs better for predicting student academic performance, followed by the decision tree

Summary

Introduction

Information Technology (IT) jobs continue to grow in several disciplines, such as cloud computing, cyber security, mobile applications and big data analytics [1]. Recommendation systems have been a research topic for a long time [2] They are simple algorithms that aim to provide the most relevant and accurate items to the user. We propose CareerRec, a recommendation system that relies on machine learning algorithms to help IT graduates choose their future career. The recommender can be utilized by job seekers to explore and identify the skills required by the IT market. Many new jobs in IT are being created through growing industries that require advanced technical skills, putting pressure on local labor markets and technical education systems. Reducing the gap between the skills the IT market needs and the skills of IT graduates is essential in bridging the gap between supply and demand in the ICT sector

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