Intelligent Career Advisers in Your Pocket? A Need Assessment Study of Chatbots for Student Career Advising

Publication Date

January 2019

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

25th Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS, Cancun

Abstract

Supporting student career readiness has been a major goal for the business college. Students frequently face challenges in seeking sufficient career advising support on campus due to the low advisor-to-student ratio. As one of the artificial intelligence and conversational technologies, chatbots have gained an increasing amount of attention in recent years. We aim at leveraging chatbots to offer accessible and personalized career advising services to college students. As the first step, this research in progress reports a need assessment study of a chatbot-based intelligent career advisor. We first developed a chatbot as an experimental platform to interview its potential advisees – college students. Through a chatbot-led user study with 350 undergraduate students, we found chatbots could potentially provide four levels of career advising services: offering information and recommendations, providing intervention on career development, augmenting career counselors’ work, and providing career counseling. We then pointed out areas of challenges and future work.

Keywords

Chatbot, conversational agents, student success, artificial intelligence

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