The decision-making process for career selection is a complex situation for students who are going through their transition from high school to higher education. In this paper, a decision-support system (DSS) architecture was designed to help address the aforementioned problem. Using the instrumental case study research method, the study investigated the decision-making process of incoming college students in their career selection and identified user requirements essential to the development of the decision-support system by following a four-phase Waterfall methodology for systems development. The study was anchored on social cognitive career theory (SCCT), which served as the basis for the inclusion of decision-making factors. The University of the Philippines (UP) was chosen as the case site for being the national state university of the country and having its own streamlined, process-centered admission system, the UPCAT. Factors derived from SCCT were further validated from interview responses of UPCAT 2024 applicants who recently underwent this decision-making process in their career selection. Responses from the interview were transcribed and imported into NVivo software for coding and theme segmentation. These themes were then organized into business, functional, nonfunctional, and system requirements. The requirements were transformed to requirements modeling through use case diagramming and data modeling through entity relationship diagramming. A user interface (UI) prototype of the career selection DSS, named UP College Admission Decision-making Tool (UP-CADET), was the final output designed using Figma. Finally, results from 23 potential users of the user acceptance test, using a 7-point Likert scale, indicated positive views for UP-CADET.

Keywords

career selection, decision support system, user interface prototype, system architecture, admission system development.