Experienced professionals possess extensive professional, project, and leadership experience that holds significant strategic value for companies. At the same time, job seekers face particular challenges during career transitions, as digital selection procedures and standardized application processes often capture complex career biographies only inadequately. As a result, valuable experience and competencies frequently remain invisible, even though they are relevant to many companies. Particularly in restructuring and outplacement scenarios, this makes the fast and precise placement of experienced professionals into new career opportunities more difficult.

This is where CareerXplore comes in. The project is being implemented within the framework of the XAI Studio, in collaboration with Senior Connect GmbH. The XAI Studio is supported by the Institute of Business Analytics (IBA) at Ulm University and the Institute for Information Systems at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The goal of CareerXplore is to design, develop, and scientifically evaluate an explanatory, AI-supported career explorer that assists job seekers in their professional reorientation. The career explorer guides users in reflecting on their experience and competencies, discovering new career opportunities, and making informed decisions about their further career development.

To this end, the project combines modern methods of Artificial Intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), and Human-AI Interaction. Based on individual competency profiles, the career explorer supports the collaborative exploration and reflection of professional options, makes the connections between prior experience and new requirements transparent, and enables the interactive exploration of alternative career paths. Users thereby gain a better understanding of their individual strengths, potential areas for development, and new career opportunities.

Through the combination of exploration, explainability, and Human-AI Interaction, the project aims to strengthen the self-efficacy of job seekers, improve the quality of career decisions, and support the development of new professional perspectives. In the long term, the project is intended to help promote the labor market integration of experienced professionals and to more effectively align existing competencies with the needs of the labor market.

Transfer

The project aims to generate insights into how Explainable AI and Human-AI Interaction can be used to support professional reorientation. To this end, it will investigate how an AI-based career explorer can support the exploration of professional options, the reflection on individual competencies, and informed decision-making. In addition, design principles for comprehensible, interactive, and user-centered AI systems will be derived, which can be transferred to further application areas of labor market integration and outplacement.