SINGAPORE - More than 13,000 students from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have downloaded a mobile application that aims to prepare them for the workforce.
The NUS career+ app, which was officially launched on Monday (Jan 25), makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data to help students plan their education and career, by keeping track of skills acquired and what skills job sectors are looking for.
The app, which was jointly developed by NUS and JobTech, a local tech start-up that provides job matching services, released its beta version in September 2018.
The app, which all 40,000 NUS undergraduates can sign up for, draws up a personalised skills profile based on a student's academic record. Students can select career domains of interest, which will generate a career readiness' progress bar.
A short progress bar means the student needs to take more relevant modules to close the skills gap. The app will then recommend suitable modules to take.
In a statement on Monday, NUS said that while traditional job portals make recommendations based on search preferences, its app analyses millions of job postings daily to suggest roles that are likely to be a good fit for a given student's profile.
"This exposes them to a wider variety of job opportunities including areas which they may not be familiar with," said the university, which is holding its annual career fest over three days this week ( Jan 25, Jan 27 and Jan 29). This year's edition will be its largest virtual career fair to date.
To help students adapt to job disruptions, the NUS app also has several functions, like a Talent Future Index score, which shows which skills are likely to be in future demand.
In addition, a skills graph feature allows students to map out their skillsets visually and identify adjacent skills that are aligned to market demand.
Professor Ho Teck Hua, NUS senior deputy president and provost, said: "Adoption of digital platforms has accelerated in a structural rather than cyclical way. To thrive in the fast-evolving and ever-uncertain new economy requires us to embrace AI-driven tools such as the NUS career+ app that can give our graduates a competitive edge in their job search, whilst enabling students to identify course modules best aligned to their career interests."
Welcoming the new app, NUS fourth-year economics major Lee Wei Jie, 26, said that the personalised information in the app is helpful, and will help students like him ease into the world of work.
"The module recommendation feature was useful in highlighting how I may bridge the skills gap, and complements the career readiness indicator that gives me a sense of how prepared I am for different career pathways," he said.
