Abstract:

Nowadays, social networking sites are among most popular online applications. They have become an integral part of everyday life of many people. The present paper focuses on VKontakte because this social networking site is the most popular in Russia and widely used in adjoining regions. Activity on this site leaves digital footprints, which can be used to improve career guidance practice. At the same time, given the existence of an increasing number of educational opportunities and vocations, the traditional way of choosing the right career is becoming increasingly difficult.
Our goal is to show that machine learning approach can be adopted to provide a fully automatic career guidance application for VKontakte site. This is called Career Robot. The purpose of this paper is to explain, present and illustrate how Career Robot was developed and is used for automatic career counselling at VKontakte social networking site.
Career Robot recommends vocational interests with regard to one of ten areas: administration and management, health, education, creativity, media, manufacture, security and emergency, sales and marketing, IT, research and development. In order to involve VKontakte users in the process of planning their future careers, Career Robot recommends majors in Russian higher educational institutions.
Finally, we discuss the potential of Career Robot for practical and managerial implications in educational context, related papers and opportunities for future development.

Keywords:

career guidance, social networking sites, vocational interests, major choice, robots.