Single career quiz could lead to better advice

Launched by the Human Resources Planning Commission in 2019, Talent.gov.hk is a career exploration website for Hongkongers. The website features three quizzes that recommend career paths based on users’ backgrounds, interests and skills. The commission should consolidate these quizzes to enhance the user experience.

In both the quizzes on skills and interests, users have to answer at least six questions about their preferences for certain job conditions and their competence levels in specific tasks to receive some recommendations. Yet, the recommended career choices will be updated when more questions are answered. It is not clear how many questions the user should answer to receive the most useful advice.

The quiz on user background collects information such as educational attainment, fields of study, years of work experience and current occupation. This quiz is rather inflexible as predefined answers that appear based on user input must be selected. For example, users currently not working cannot finish the quiz as “unemployed” is not one of the pre-existing options.

As the three quizzes are presented on the same web page, users may be confused about which quiz they should take. Since career decisions have to be made taking into consideration a range of factors, a single quiz covering all three aspects would be more effective.

The commission could also collect feedback from users to assess their thoughts on the career paths to further improve its recommendation algorithm.

Lixiang Wan, Kowloon Tong