A Conversational Intelligent Agent for Career Guidance and Counseling

Navigating a career constitutes one of life’s most enduring challenges, particularly within a unique organization like the US Navy. While the Navy has numerous resources for guidance, accessing and identifying key information sources across the many existing platforms can be challenging for sailors (e.g., determining the appropriate program or point of contact, developing an accurate understanding of the process, and even recognizing the need for planning itself). Focusing on intermediate goals, evaluations, education, certifications, and training is quite demanding, even before considering their cumulative long-term implications. These are on top of generic personal issues, such as financial difficulties and homesickness when at sea for prolonged periods. We present the preliminary construction of a conversational intelligent agent designed to provide a user-friendly, adaptive environment that recognizes user input pertinent to these issues and provides guidance to appropriate resources within the Navy. User input from “counseling sessions” is linked, using advanced natural language processing techniques, to our framework of Navy training and education standards, promotion protocols, and organizational structure, producing feedback on resources and recommendations sensitive to user history and stated career goals. The proposed innovative technology monitors sailors’ career progress, proactively triggering sessions before major career milestones or when performance drops below Navy expectations, by using a mixed-initiative design. System-triggered sessions involve positive feedback and informative dialogues (using existing Navy career guidance protocols). The intelligent agent also offers counseling for personal problems, triggering targeted dialogues designed to gather more information, offer tailored suggestions, and provide referrals to appropriate resources or to a human counselor when in-depth counseling is warranted. This software, currently in alpha testing, has the potential to serve as a centralized information hub, engaging and encouraging sailors to take ownership of their career paths in the most efficient way possible, benefiting both individuals and the Navy as a whole.