Career Jump Start

Project description

The goal of this project is to create an application that will aid people from the target audience in their professional development, be it finding an internship, finding a job, or reintegrating professionals back into the field after a long absence from work. This is because the target group is not getting the proper support now, and we want to change that. The system is an alternative and new way to help people in their professional careers. The system is to be used by different actors in the system, such as a job seeker, a coach (job-matcher), and a company hiring professional.

The main research question:
“How can we build an application that effectively matches students with companies?”

Context

Students and young professionals with a functional impairment or a chronic condition struggle with succeeding in their professional development. This group has a three-time higher chance of remaining unemployed after their study. During their study they already struggle with finding an internship. According to research (Buscher-Touwen, van Hal & de Groot, 2018), this group is insufficiently supported in the Netherlands in compared to other EU-countries. In the Eindhoven region alone, 751 people of the target group are finding it hard to start their professional careers.

Studies show that ‘soft factors’ e.g., levels of professional skill, workplace environment factors, and social support from co-workers play a big role in this problem. Based on these factors, job matchers can help the target audience with finding a suitable place to work and hopefully has a long-lasting successful career

Results

The research question for this project is "How can we build an application that effectively matches students with companies?" The project aimed to assist students in finding jobs. The research focused on accommodating for people with limitations, determining the best structure for the application, and choosing the most suitable cloud hosting service. The project is currently at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7, which means that it is near the end of development but not quite ready for full commercial deployment. The project has completed most of the user story requirements, has created and dockerized the necessary microservices, and has a nearly complete user interface. However, it is not yet hosted online, and some functionality is still missing. The project uses the DOT framework and focuses on Field, Workshop, and Library methods for conducting research.
For this project we had 3 sub-questions:
How to accommodate for people with limitations?

We conducted multiple feedback sessions with the Project Owner, who is accustomed to dealing with people with special needs, we refined the user interface design

To make sure that the system's user interface accommodates people with special needs, we conducted multiple feedback sessions with the Project owner. The project owner is accustomed to dealing with people with limitations and knows what will cause issues for such users. In these feedback sessions we went over the design and flow of the website and gathered these important results:


How should the application be structured?

We had to reuse and build on top of a system that was in development and transitioned to us by a previous group of students. To make sure we understand the structure of the current platform. But we also improved and redesign some parts of the application to better fit the needs of the project and also to better follow the proper design principles.

We restructured a large portion of the underlying code for the front end of the application to match the needs of the new features that had to be developed

We continued to follow the principle of building microservices-based applications, by creating a new service for the two new and large user requirements, user matching and generation matching recommendations.


Which cloud hosting service works the best for the application?

As mentioned in the previous sections, pricking up a project that was already in production, meant that we already had access to a deployment environment and hosting service.

After analysing the cost and effort required to keep the current deployment strategy, we decided that we had to switch from using the AWS deployment that was implemented by the previous group. We also had to consider the fact that after finishing the development stage of the application..

As a result of this, we used Docker-compose containerisation, to package the system into small containers which later can be easily deployed in any environment, thus allowing our client to host it within their company servers.

About the project group

In our our group our main subject is software engineering, with 3 people who have done AI for specialisation and one who did smart mobile.