Career Elevation

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  Career Elevation

Inspiration

As aspiring engineers, I always wanted to visually see a trackway of the possible choices I can go towards as well as learning what new skills are necessary in order to proceed to reach such goals. It's difficult to understand what career path to go towards if you're unfamiliar or new to the field. This was the motivation that made me ponder, "What can I do to track and see your own progress for such goals?". That's where Career Elevation has come into being.

What it does

Career Elevation sets and checks your current progress of a selected job goal you may want to achieve. This could be a software engineering internship, IT, or other job fields like frontend/backend that comes from companies across Oklahoma City and Norman. You can input your current set of skills on your profile and can view your progression graph of the selected job title and add new skills you can learn throughout.

Essentially, what it does is: Lets you pick your profile (or create one from a resume). Lets you pick a target job (e.g. internship at Devon, Paycom, OU IT). Shows a match score and a mountain-style progress toward that role. Lists missing skills and whether they’re “Base Camp” (foundational) or “The Peak” (advanced). Suggests learning resources and OU course equivalents for those skills. Shows local opportunities on a map (Norman/OKC area). So the “whole project” is: skill-gap analysis + career path visualization + resume parsing + local job map, all wrapped in an “elevation/climb” theme.

How we built it

For frontend, I used React, Tailwind CSS, and Vite for the server setups. I also use Leaflet and openStreetMaps for the map display with pinpoints that shows the job opportunities. Towards backend usage, I used a Sprint Root and Data framework that deals with repo adjustments, REST APIs, and other data applications. For the databases, I used PostgreSQL, H2, Maven, and Hibernate that manages objects and production entities that navigates the profile storage. I also used Apache Tika to help create and manage the imported Resume PDF/docx formatted files for users to autofill with OpenAI.

Challenges we ran into

Major challenges were really the database managements, as at the time, I was unsure of what information do I want users to fill in respect to the current tracking progress. This ultimately made multiple revisions with the code in which what objects and entity relationships I would need to connect from PostgreSQL to the actual display of skills and process. Additionally, having multiple terminals running at the same time has caused massive headache due to the deep connection links between the frontend and backend files, causing website node.js servers to output continuous errors that require multiple revisions and modifications from the affected files.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of creating a simple, yet unique idea that highlights the connections where users can now visually see their own career paths. As a student, it's still in the moment where I don't know where to go from here on out and building something like this can make me think that it may help others too.

What we learned

I learned how and what it takes to brainstorm and think of simple ideas that can make you feel comfortable pushing onwards to. It's always what make me interested in computer science and software engineering, as it requires deep thought and persistence to better understand what you are truly building.

What's next for Career Elevation

I hope I can still continue building on this, but most likely be kept. I would love to maybe use this project as a reference for future projects that aligns with my goals and skills!

Built With

• css
• html
• java
• leaflet.js
• maven
• openai
• postgresql
• react
• sprintroot
• tailwind
• vite