Data-grounded education-to-career pathway exploration
NexusPath Navigator is an early-stage AI-supported decision-support tool designed to help learners and advisors connect educational programs, skills, occupations, and changing workforce needs.
Rather than producing unexplained recommendations, the system is designed to show why particular pathways may be relevant and help users consider options through collaborative, informed decision-making.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Making complex pathway decisions clearer
Learners must often navigate disconnected information about academic programs, occupational requirements, skills, and labor-market change. Career advisors face the same information challenges while serving many individuals with different goals and constraints.
NexusPath Navigator is designed to bring these sources together so that users can explore education and career options more systematically without reducing complex decisions to a single automated recommendation.
Your underlying research identifies insufficient individualized advising capacity, fragmented education and workforce information, and uncertainty about how AI may reshape occupations as core problems.
WHAT IT IS FOR
Explore careers from an educational program
Identify occupations connected to a field of study and examine the skills, knowledge, and work characteristics associated with those options.
Explore education from a career goal
Start with an occupation or career interest and identify relevant competencies, programs, degree levels, and learning pathways.
Understand changing work
Consider how AI may affect different occupational activities while accounting for the interpersonal, physical, organizational, and contextual demands of the work.
Receive explanations, not black-box answers
See the reasoning behind suggested program-to-career connections and the evidence used to support them.
The proof of concept uses multi-turn interaction to clarify preferences, connect programs with occupations, and generate explanation-driven guidance grounded in structured data.
HOW IT WORKS
Human judgment remains central
- A learner or advisor describes an educational or career goal.
- NexusPath Navigator asks clarifying questions about preferences and constraints.
- The system connects the request with structured education and occupational information.
- It presents relevant options with supporting explanations.
- The learner and advisor evaluate the alternatives and decide what to investigate next.
The current proof of concept links O*NET occupational information with IPEDS postsecondary program data and uses conversational retrieval to support pathway-level reasoning.