Software Development: Education Web Portal Case Study
Association of Colleges
Brief
To build the London CareerTrack - a system that provides an interactive resource for job providers, colleges and prospective employees in the Greater London area, through the Association of Colleges (AoC) website.
Business Case
The Association of Colleges promotes the interests of the 485 colleges in England and Wales. Membership of the Association includes tertiary, agricultural, general, specialist designated, art and design, performing arts and sixth form colleges. The London region is leading the CareerTrack system.
Although there are several recruitment agencies with web presence, none of their websites provide features that bring individuals, job/recruitment agencies, employers and colleges together. In addition, none of these sites exclusively target London. The London Learning Village Central Course Database system (part of the www.LondonColleges.com website, and also developed by i-teba) provides the public with London college course information. The CareerTrack system will use the London Learning Village system to enquire on course information.
Implementation
The AoC’s main criterion was to utilise tried and tested technologies. AoC’s existing systems ran on Microsoft based platforms - these were compatible with i-teba’s proposed solution.
The system processes career information provided by the user and presents options based on information pooled from various colleges, job providers, AoC Staff and other individual databases.
The job and CV search modules allow third party websites to seamlessly integrate with the CareerTrack website. To achieve this, these two modules were developed as DCOM objects and were written in Visual Basic 6.
i-teba’s large pool of technical resource with excellent Microsoft development skills meant that the development was completed successfully within AoC’s timescale and budget. It also meant the support costs would be lower and solutions to any technical problems would be resolved quickly.
Technologies Used
- architecture: n-tier client/server
- application layer: ASP (Active Server Pages) and DCOM (written in Visual Basic 6)
- database: Microsoft SQL Server 2000
- presentation: HTML and JavaScript
- application server: Microsoft IIS 5
- operating system: Windows 2000
Benefits
- one stop shop to help people decide their next career move
- allows individuals to identify skills they need to reach their target career
- allows individuals already employed to identify courses to upgrade their skills and qualifications
- streamlines the process of applying for jobs in London
- allows job vacancies in London to be filled quickly with the right individuals
- gives London colleges a target audience so that they can fill their course vacancies more quickly.
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