Applications: Employment Coach

Applications: The Employment Coach

A knowledge-based decision support system to help people find and keep work.

The Employment Coach is a user friendly expert system which provides information about the basic steps that should be followed to find appropriate work. The steps are presented in four major areas. Each step provides a list of issues that should be addressed and offers employment tips on how to deal with them. A special area called Trouble Spots helps people to identify and clarify issues underlying some of the problems they may encounter while looking for work. This area offers pointers to useful resources that can help.

The initial screen in the Employment Coach presents a menu of the Employment Steps. Each step starts with a background document and then lists the items that should be addressed in that step. For example, Career Exploration lists its background document followed by specific issues that people should address in order to find out what kind of work would be appropriate for them. Each issue in the list is associated with a set of employment tips related to that issue. If people need further help, they can refer to the Trouble Spots menu which lists common problems encountered by people seeking work and provides pointers to resources that may help: self-help, Internet or local resources.

The Employment Coach was designed to be an open system which can be easily changed to adapt to local requirements. The background documents, employment tips and resources are presented in HTML documents which can be easily edited to suit local content (e.g., to add tips, resources and background information). This provides the same capability as the editors provided by the Administration Suite for the Expert Counselling System.