The Passion Compass: Using Machine Learning To Align Academic Talent With Career Success

This chapter focuses on the use of machine learning (ML) techniques as a form of 'passion compass' that can help students identify suitable career pathways concerning one’s academic strengths, internal drives, and work-related goals. We devise a model, which predicts future career potential, based on the integration of academic achievements, personality, the alignment of one’s passions, and the level of one’s competencies. The Random Forest method, in this case, gives a prediction accuracy over 93%, and the passion alignment, in the feature importance analysis, falls second to the academic performance (24.5%) with 18.7%. The evidence of the impact of one’s passion on career satisfaction has been well documented and is robust (β = 0.713, R² = 0.547). We conclude this chapter with the outline of an innovative, integrated, and holistic career guidance system based on machine learning that maximises student’s wellbeing and enhances the effectiveness of the labour market.