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Behind the Online Career Counselor

fragebogen

  posted by 07 September 2010

The Executive School at the University of St.Gallen is one of the leading business Universities in Europe providing Executive Education to individuals and companies. With a portfolio of over 350 course offerings, they face a massive challenge in matching candidates with the right course to match their professional ambitions. Personal, phone based counseling, is a time-consuming task, and limits the number of candidates who can be managed. ICON was therefore tasked with developing an “intelligent” online alternative.

Career Counselor

Each of the University’s hundreds of courses is mapped to a series of answer sets. This data relationship allows for detailed, personalized, results on completion of the 17 question survey. On survey completion, the prospective student is given a listing of relevant courses from their completed survey information.

The front-end of the application is a multilingual interface, with the ability to switch from English to German text at any time, without impacting the survey’s progress. The survey is broken-up into three consecutive sections, and allows the user to complete the survey in any order. All interactions and animations are powered by jQuery, with custom JavaScript for sliding through sections, language switching and all form animations. The application is built on PHP using the framework CodeIgniter, separating all views and templates from the custom survey logic and large course data model. The application has two separate MySQL databases, one for the large course database and the other for all survey questions, answers, and user information.

For the University, the real strength of this application is the admin tool. The back-end tool allows for members of the University to manage all aspects of the application. Through this custom Content Management System (CMS), University members are allowed to update and edit all questions, their answers, and all relating courses. This provides for constant updating to the relevant course information, keeping all results truly accurate.

Another great strength of the application is the saved profile information. Each survey results is recorded and saved in a database. This gives the University’s career counselors a great asset when discussing student’s career goals, they are able to review their submitted survey to get a great overview of the prospective student.