An expert advisor for vocational guidance Joachim P. Hasebrook 1 and Wolfgang Nathusius 2 1 Bank Academy, Oeder Weg 16-18, D-60318 Frankfurt 2 Medialog Corp., Kolpingstr. 18, D-68165 Mannheim Source: Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 8(1), 21-41. We developed a multimedia program which combines a vocational encyclopedia and a testing facility to foster adequate career decisions. The testing facility is designed to suggest the same careers which a given number of experts would have suggested, if presented with the same user’s input. Our vocational database includes imprecise data like expert ratings enabling the calculation of suggestions of career options. The most important group of users of software for vocational guidance are young adults, who are about to leave schools. The results of cluster analyses (n=426) show that the interests of students are poor structured and are not compatible with experts´ ratings. The test facility has been implemented on several CD-ROMs, a short quiz to identify occupational fields, and a wide range of surveys which are responded by letters. 43 students participated in an experiment to investigate the understanding and acceptance of the information provided by the system. The results show that students are able to judge, whether careers match their individual interests or not. Furthermore, we explore whether the system is able to reconstruct 38 experts´ ratings. The system shows a good performance in reconstructing the experts´ data – except of one academical career which was not described very clearly. In a recent study, we tested the influence of the testing facility on recall of information and individual acceptance (n=75). Acceptance and recall of information about career options is clearly enhanced when studying individualized materials compared to more general information. Introduction Many people feel a lack of competence in career decision making. A lot of programs provide help but most of them cover selected topics and are judged to be of poor quality (Katz, 1993; Bridges, 1989). We developed a multimedia program which combines a vocational encyclopedia and a testing facility to foster adequate career decisions. The testing facility is designed to maximize the probability to suggest careers which a given number of experts - based upon the same user input - would have suggested. The testing facility and the vocational encyclopedia have been implemented on microcomputers using Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and on UNIX machines. Although knowledge based systems and intelligent tutoring system (ITS) are well established tools, there are hardly any implementations of systems for vocational diagnosing and counseling (Ueckert, 1995). Psychological testing procedures including computer- supported diagnosis are used to conduct aptitude tests in personnel selection (e.g. Ghiselli, 1973; Sweetland & Keyer, 1984; Funke, 1993), adaptive testing optimizing economy and performance of personality, aptitude, and ability tests (e.g. Cronbach & Gleser, 1965; Park & Tennyson, 1983; Weiss & Vale, 1987; Bennett, 1993), and decision analysis applied to management diagnostics (Nagel, 1993; Sonnenberg, 1993). Although there are numerous tests which check for individual interests (e.g. Todt, 1967; Irle & Allehoff, 1984), ability (ITB, 1988a+b, Deidesheimer Kreis, 1993), and aptitude (Fock & Engelbrecht, 1986), there are hardly any computer-based, psychological testing