Wajha/وجهة

Wajha وجهة — AI Career Guidance for Gulf Students Inspiration Growing up in Bahrain, I watched classmates graduate with no clear direction — not because they lacked ambition, but because there was no tool built for us.

Career guidance platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed are designed for the Western job market. They don't speak Arabic, they don't show Bahraini salaries, and they don't understand what it means to be a Gulf student choosing between a government job and a startup.

Wajha was built to fix that. The name means "destination" in Arabic — because every student deserves to know where they're headed.

What It Does

Wajha is an AI-powered career guidance platform built specifically for Bahraini and Gulf Arab students. It helps students go from "I have no idea what to do" to a clear, personalized career roadmap in under 5 minutes.

Core features:

17-question AI onboarding quiz that matches students to careers based on personality, skills, and goals

Personalized career roadmaps with step-by-step milestones, certifications, and project ideas

Real Bahrain salary data across 4,074+ careers

CV gap analysis that identifies missing skills and skippable milestones

University program matching across all 18 Bahrain universities

Live job and internship links filtered for Gulf roles

Bilingual Arabic and English interface throughout

How I Built It

The entire platform was built together over several weeks using:

Next.js (Pages Router) for the frontend and API routes

Supabase as the database storing 4,074 careers, 34,815 milestones, 16,296 branches, and 441 university programs

Groq API with llama-3.3-70b-versatile for all AI features including career matching, roadmap generation, and CV analysis

Tailwind CSS and Framer Motion for UI and animations

Vercel for deployment and hosting

The database was the most intensive part, manually curating and structuring career data specific to the Bahrain and Gulf job market, with real salary ranges sourced from local job boards and industry reports.

Challenges

Data quality was the hardest challenge. Generic career databases don't include Bahraini salary data or Gulf-specific career paths. Building a database of 4,074 careers with accurate local salary ranges, demand levels, and time-to-hire estimates required significant research and curation.

Bilingual UI was technically tricky,mixing Arabic RTL text with English LTR layouts in the same components required careful CSS handling throughout the entire codebase.

AI accuracy was an ongoing challenge. Getting the career matching algorithm to return relevant, diverse results without bleeding into irrelevant fields required multiple iterations of prompt engineering and post-processing logic.

What I Learned

How to architect a full-stack AI product from scratch

Prompt engineering for structured JSON outputs from large language models

Database design for large relational datasets in Supabase

How to build bilingual (Arabic/English) web applications

The importance of building for a specific audience rather than trying to serve everyone

What's Next

Full UI redesign in a premium Claymorphism style

Jobs and internships tab with live Gulf job board integration

Mobile app version

Expansion to other GCC countries (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait)

Partnerships with Bahraini universities and the Ministry of Education

SDG Alignment

Wajha directly supports SDG 4 (Quality Education) by providing free, accessible, personalized career guidance to students who cannot afford private career counselors. It also supports SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) by connecting Gulf youth to in-demand careers and reducing graduate unemployment in the region.