“Which vocational training program is best for me?” – Design of a recommender system for school students using large language models
Alexander Piazza, Sigurd Schacht, M. Herzog · 2025
School students need to make decisions about their career paths after graduating.In Germany, students can choose between more than 300 vocational training programs, which can be overwhelming.Frequently, the students hesitate to talk with career counselors.The objective of this research is, therefore, to provide a recommendation system for school students to support their decision-making, which is based on their interests and provides recommendations with explanations based on a LLM.This system was developed with a social robot as the user interface to make it easy to use and appeal to the young target group.Based on user observations, preliminary findings indicate that the system is a valuable and engaging approach to support career counseling activities.