AI-Assisted Career Planning – From Excel to a Cloud-Based Proactive PDP System
Overview: Personal Development Plans (PDPs) are a vital tool for employee growth and performance tracking. At Knowit, PDPs are currently managed manually through Excel files—making the process tedious, error-prone, and difficult to analyze at scale. With recent advances in AI and cloud platforms, there is now an opportunity to create a smarter, more interactive PDP experience that supports consultants and their managers throughout the development cycle.
Description
Key Components
1. LLM-Assisted Goal Generation:
- Use domain-specific datasets (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins docs, Terraform examples) to improve generation accuracy.
- Evaluate trade-offs between fine-tuned models and a RAG pipeline.
2. Timeline and KPI Builder:
- Automatically propose realistic timelines, key performance indicators, and goal difficulty levels using smart defaults and historical goal patterns.
- Allow interactive adjustment via a calendar-style interface for both consultants and supervisors.
3. Goal Tracking and Feedback Loop:
- Implement real-time progress monitoring of PDP goals.
- Alert mentors when goals require attention, feedback, or follow-up.
- Use AI to generate initial draft feedback based on past mentor phrasing and outcome patterns.
4. Smart Classification and Visualization:
- Automatically detect vague, duplicate, or overly generic goals and suggest improved formulations.
- Provide dashboards for managers to monitor PDP progress at team, unit, or company level.
5. Cloud-Hosted and Secure:
- Deploy the platform on Azure or AWS with full support for Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) single sign-on.
- Ensure versioning, secure storage, and user access control for all PDP data.
Challenges
- Ensuring the AI suggestions remain personalized and relevant across diverse roles and levels of seniority.
- Balancing automated goal support with human supervision to preserve authenticity and mentorship quality.
- Designing NLP models that can accurately classify goal clarity, detect improvement needs, and support different PDP formats.
- Creating a scalable backend that supports hundreds of concurrent users and large volumes of goal data.
Impact
- Reduces manual effort by automating goal suggestions, tracking, and feedback.
- Improves mentor–mentee interactions with timely updates and AI support.
- Encourages continuous development through personalized insights.
- Provides managers with a clear overview of team progress.
- Supports scalable, data-driven career planning aligned with organizational goals.