Development of a Web-Enabled Expert System for Career Path Guidance of the Unbundled Computer Science Programme in the Nigerian Polytechnics

The National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) recently unbundled the Computer Science programme in the Nigerian Polytechnics into four options at the Higher National Diploma (HND) Level. These options are Software and Web Development, Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Cloud Computing. The prospective students of HND for the options are at crossroad with the challenges of selecting the best or suitable option amongst the four available options. This challenges is caused as a result of inadequate knowledge about the prospects and professional skills/requirements that are abound in each of the options. It is in view of this that this research modelled an expert system that guides the prospective students of HND in decision making of selecting a suitable career option, with the adoption of expert system architecture and components, where the prospects and professional skills/requirements are domiciled for prospective students for adequate knowledge and guidance for right decision of career choice/option of the unbundled Computer Science programme. The development was carried out on a system running Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate platform/Microsoft Windows 8 platform. Being a responsive web application, the client-side/user/web interface pages were encoded and developed using “Bootstrap 3” front-end framework for (cross-platform/responsive-web). The “Bootstrap 3” contains HTML5 (Hyper Text Markup Language), CSS3 (Cascade Style Sheet), and JavaScript. For the back-end, XAMPP was used as web server with support for PHP as a scripting language and MySQL for working memory functional database. Keywords: Domiciled, Expert System, Prospective, Unbundling. XAMPP Journal Reference Format: Alao Kazeem Akinbola & Iyanda Waleola Samsondeen (2026): Development of a Web-Enabled Expert System for Career Path Guidance of the Unbundled Computer Science Programme in the Nigerian Polytechnics. Journal of Behavioural Informatics, Digital Humanities and Development Research. Vol. 12 No. 1. Pp. 7-32. isteams.net dx.doi.org