A Website for the Career Guidance Unit of University Of Colombo

Abstract

Career guidance is a most important service expected by the students of universities. Most of the academic institutes separately manage a unit in order to provide the career counselling services to students. University of Colombo has its own career guidance unit separately and it faces some issues in providing its services efficiently to students. Since the number of graduates increase every year they cannot manually give awareness to each in every aspect. The opportunity to gather all students in one place at a time is difficult for the administration. Because of this time and resource limitation the CGU cannot organize any scheduled events regarding the career opportunities and technical competency every time for every students. To overcome above limitation CGU took a step to go online to extend its services. Even though they have a separate website it was a static non interactive and uncompleted online system. Therefore the functional requirements were failed to achieve by the online career service. The new proposed CGU website was expected to support dynamic content and expected to behave interactively with end users to utilize the services efficiently. Requirements were gathered using the face to face interviews. Based on the requirements obtained, the design specifications were constructed using object-oriented design concepts. UML diagrams were used to depict the overall system. The functional requirements were to develop a dynamic web application which can be accessed by both students and Companies and allow them to register, advertise job openings, allow students to view and apply for jobs, share training materials and video sessions in the site and allow students to access them and download if needed, department can publish or post their upcoming training plans and students can enroll to them, CGU admin can upload IQ exams to the system and students can take those exams to test their IQs while non-functional requirements were user-friendly, accuracy, security and reusability etc. Agile development methodology was followed to implement the CGU website. The CGU web site was developed based on content management system using the DotNetNuke tool. The Microsoft SQL server 2008 was used as backend server. Successfully completed CGU web application met the client requirements and also fulfilled the expected functional and non-functional requirements.