Inspiration
As a public school teacher in Cleveland, my students often ask me for career advice. I would love to steer them toward less conventional careers when it suits their interests and skills, but my personal knowledge is limited by my experience. I wanted a way to improve my own knowledge through regular doses of careers I might not have on my radar, while also offering the same exposure to others.
What it does
This skill returns a random career when prompted & lets the user know that further interaction will be available in future releases.
How I built it
I took the basic flash card tutorial code for "Space Geek" and replaced the space facts with career titles from data that the U.S. government collects.
Challenges I ran into
The entirety of the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) was available for download from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website, but in XML format. It was too large for any of the online XML->JSON converters, so I had to write a Python script to extract levels of the hierarchy for entry as JSON in the Lambda function.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Finding and using the xml.etree.ElementTree module in Python to convert data from XML to JSON for this project was a happy moment for me.
What I learned
Since this was my first successful attempt at Alexa Skills development, I learned the basics of Voice User Interface development.
What's next for Career Path
I'm excited to scrape deeper into the XML hierarchy for a more interactive user experience. There is a wealth of information in a given year's OOH and I am eager to make this information available at will to teens and career changers. To this end, I would also like to streamline my Python scripts to enable easy updating of this interface as new OOHs are released by the BLS.
My ultimate goal is to build gender-balance into a recommender algorithm by allowing users to respond with "like/dislike" to refine preferences and incorporating workforce demographic data to promote certain careers in which the user's demographic is underrepresented. I'm also likely going to switch my web scraping over to the Beautiful Soup module of Python.
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