CareerBrain will connect students to new pathways

The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025, automation and a new division of labour between humans and machines will disrupt 85 million jobs globally, creating the need for workers across the world to upskill and reskill to keep pace with recent technology. The recent pandemic alone provided a major labour disruption worldwide, leading to unemployment rates as high as 20 per cent.  

To help York students and alumni navigate this ever-changing job landscape, the School of Continuing Studies (SCS) partnered with Lightcast Data to create CareerBrain, a data driven career navigator. The work of creating and testing the algorithm began in 2021, while promotion followed in 2022. 

CareerBrain draws its insights from the world’s largest and most sophisticated database of labour market data. It uses a proprietary data-driven algorithm to match a users’ experience and transferable skills to in-demand roles, adjacent roles and non-intuitive career paths.  

Using CareerBrain, a student’s background may lead them to career ideas they never would have imagined for themselves, because artificial intelligence and big data offer insights from patterns that they, themselves, can’t identify. With CareerBrain, Canadian professionals and job seekers will gain a holistic view of their adjacent career options to make data-driven decisions about their desired career trajectories.   

“CareerBrain will complement your own intuition and understanding and give you a broader view of the opportunities available to you,” says Tracey Taylor-O’Reilly, director of SCS. 

The new career navigator will also provide users with an abundance of employment data, including average salaries, in-demand roles, job demand by region, growth rates and top employers. Each user will also receive a curated list of upskilling and reskilling programs developed in partnership with industry leaders. 

“Job hunting is stressful at best, and it has become more challenging than ever in our ever-changing post-pandemic world,” says Taylor-O’Reilly. “York is eager to help students prepare for the future, which we at SCS see as one of lifelong learning. To us, that means not only earning an advanced degree, but taking the opportunity to upgrade skills and knowledge at regular intervals with courses and experiential education. Career Brain is an exciting tool that is designed to point our students and graduates in the right direction.”     

Look for this much-vaunted online tool to be introduced to the York community sometime in 2023.