Careers Wales

Careers Wales is a publicly-funded body dedicated to helping individuals move successfully into education, training and sustainable employment. With 80 Careers Centres and Careers Shops across Wales they aim to be acknowledged as the high-quality market leader in lifelong career planning and education-business links.

To further their mission of helping people progress from education into employment, Careers Wales wanted to increase the range of information available on their site to help school children and leavers make informed decisions about their career and learning options. With a wide variety of sources from JobCentre Plus vacancies to careers videos from icould, as well as Careers Wales’ own wealth of resources, it was essential that the information be presented in as clear and accessible a format as possible. 

As part of a wider site overhaul, Box UK’s development team created a dedicated interactive career planning tool for Careers Wales. Available to all, but primarily targeted at Careers Advisers in schools, the tool helps those in education identify career opportunities based on their skills and interests, along with the steps they should take to move successfully into these roles.

The career planning tool provides a raft of information crucial to making a career choice from data on average wages and standard qualifications required,  to vacancies, courses available and much more. All data is provided by a third-party service via an API integrated into the site by Box UK; Careers Wales is the first organisation to use this API and a rollout is currently being planned across a number of other UK regions.

In order to provide users with an at-a-glance view of the career landscape, the Amaxus Content Management System is used to translate raw data into highly visual graphs. A third-party video service was also integrated into the tool via the CMS to maximise the variety of learning tools available to users.

Response to the revamped Careers Wales site has been incredibly positive, and it has been praised by the Deputy Minister for Skills for its contribution to tackling youth unemployment. The career planning tool can be used in conjunction with other Careers Wales services, including a CV builder due to be released soon, to guide individuals into the world of work.

Visitors to the Careers Wales site now have instant access to information on a huge range of occupations, including videos from people in the selected professions to provide first-hand insight into the realities of the careers. By presenting the information in a visually interesting and engaging way Careers Wales are better helping these individuals to understand the career opportunities available and encouraging them to take action.