Software Implementation for Computerized Career Guidance Information Management System

1.1 Introduction

Career Guidance Information Management System Program has become an integral part of the overall educational program. With the basic assumption that all students need direction in their personal, educational, and career planning, it has become the instructional responsibility of the guidance counselor, administrator and staff to provide the students the specific knowledge and skills required to address the needs (Arevalo, 2009). One of the important services offered by CGIS is their Guidance Service. It is geared to assists the students achieve maximum development of their potentials academically to enable them to be functional, work oriented, productive and self-directing individuals. The Guidance Center helps the students understand their strengths and limitations and to enable them to adjust to their social and emotional life to the fullest.

As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitation of the study and Definition of technical terms.

1.2 Background of Study

According to Bhuiyan (2011) major computerization and infrastructure development in the public sector in Bangladesh has been taking place to replace internal manual work processes by ICT-based automation. Similarly, the impact of computer education on the efficiency of civil services Nigeria cannot be over-emphasized. The civil servants need to be educated in ICT, so that the use of typewriters, filling of information on papers in cabinets, keeping of documents and letters in files are modernized through automotion.

The job of counselling in secondary school is not an easy job to be taking into consideration the number students involved with respect to the number of staff involved. It is always very difficult to handle all the students and to remember everything about the students. This Counseling exercise needs a sophisticated system for the operation of counselling alliterates some of the problem associated with exercise. The stages where much work is carried out on counselling is in secondary schools. This is a stage when a child is grown to be able to understand maturely and when the child’s attitude is fully studied in line with academic performance. In all secondary school across the country, there exist a guidance and counsellor office where people knowledgeable in the area of psychology are employed in order to help advise the younger ones in school which way forward to their future career. There people through class visitation, Observing students during recreation and calling on them at intervals for questioning, came to know the students betters and be able to guide and counsel them in their future career probably in university or in any other area of endeavor.

The Manual system of career guidance is being phased out. It’s quite tedious, time consuming, less efficient, more prone to error and inaccurate in comparison to computerized system. A manual-based system will see information recorded and kept in different ways such as in files in the paper form. While a computer based information system will see data stored on various computer programs including on databases, Word documents, Excel. Both types of information system are designed to help a business carry out its daily running and operations.

An important aspect of the Guidance program is the fact that some students need special assistance in dealing with developmental problems and immediate crisis. With this teacher and other staff who are in direct contact with the students require assistance that can best be provided by the guidance program. Guidance program moreover is based on the belief that all students, including those with challenging needs have the right to benefit from effective instruction to ensure optimal development.

1.3 Statement of Problem

Investigation reveals the problems of the Computerized Career Guidance Information Management System existing system which entails that:

1. The number of students involved in schools counselling are very enormous and few staff in counselling cannot handle the job effectively.
2. It is always very easy to forget information about students and to reach all the students, contributes and problems.
3. Another major problem of the counselling is information storage. The made of storage of information observed from the students in different forms is not reliable and this makes the counselling to apply guess work in trying to direct students in their future career work.
4. This is a very big delay in taking decision on students concerning their future career. This is also because referencing to students information for decision making take s a very long time.

1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of the study is to Design and Implement a Computerized Career Guidance Information Management System that will provide lasting solution to the problem affecting counselling exercise in secondary schools. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows:

1. To make the criteria and process involved in the exercise of counselling very easy and flexible
2. To carefully take care of the burden, the staff faces in trying to do the work of counselling manually.
3. To provide adequate enabling environment for counselling on student to give them better career perspective
4. To maintain adequate observed information on students for future reference and quick decision taking.

1.5 Significance of Study

This study is of numerous important to the guidance and counsellor department and the society in general.

1. It will help the counsellor to always direct the students in their best career area with happiness because it will be result oriented.
2. It will help to eliminate the word frustration among the people which is very common in the society.
3. It provides comprehensive testing to determine student’s personality type.
4. The school will improve its guidance service with the help of this system.
5. The productivity of the counselors will be increased because the system can save their time.

This study could also provide future research with some necessary information regarding the ways of how to be productive in terms of developing sensible projects. Future researchers may see the findings useful as relevant information in developing a website that will be suitable and may greatly help in the development of their application software.

1.6 Scope of the Study

The study focuses on the Design and Implementation of a Computerized Career Guidance Information Management System.

1.7 Limitations of the Study

During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:

1. Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
2. Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
3. Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
4. Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).

1.8 Definition of Terms

• Counselling: To give advise to another
• Society: This is an organized group of people living together and having things together