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Ideas around skills and personalisation

We’ve been working on a few ideas to connect skills to school subjects and future careers. Things like school subjects, local institutions and personality traits give an idea about whether you’d be a good fit for a particular type of skill. Things like UAE salary and possible employers give an idea about job prospects and if it would be worthwhile to pursue this skill as a career.

Possible data

  • We’re looking for anything linking school subjects to skills, especially for WorldSkills to make the link between what they do and STEAM projects achieving curriculum goals in the UAE. The closest we could find internationally so far is: http://skillsmatch.intelligentlondon.org.uk/faq#subject_area_to_occupations
  • UAE institutions where you can train for the skill
  • Anything on the association between personality traits and vocational interests. The best thing I could find so far is: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2004-15977-002 
  • Happiness/job satisfaction in a particular skill. This is the closest I could find internationally so far: http://www.cityandguilds.com/news/November-2012/careers-happiness-index-2012#.VsDReyk1498
  • Average salary for that skill (used in the 2015 competition). 
  • Job prospects for that skill 
  • UAE employers where you might get a job with that skill

We could also use this data above to allow users to order by on the skills all layout, giving them the ability to sort the skills below into different orders. The default would be A-Z, but UAE salary, job happiness / satisfaction or other interesting aspects of the future job prospects for those skills would make great ways to sort the skills.  

Personalisation ideas

We’ve been investigating ways to suggest relevant and suitable skills to students.

Idea 1

We could have an area with a few short sentences which the user fills out (drop down or autocomplete). As they fill it out the skills below change and perhaps some custom text appears. It’s using copy as the interface and it’s meant to be like having a conversation about your future with an adult. Something like this:

An idea for Personalisation

Idea 2

This idea is a little bit more “out there” but it has the potential to attract people to the site to try it out.

  • The user would log in with Facebook or Twitter.
  • We would look at their likes and posts
  • We would run them through an AI engine to get their personality: https://watson-pi-demo.mybluemix.net/
  • Then we would match the personality to skills
  • something like this: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_22.htm- Then we would return a short summary sentence or two along with the skills below it.

We’ve no idea whether the results of these processes would be useful and it would be quite a lot of work to map the skills to personality traits, but it could be worth exploring.