CHEFIN - Equal career development opportunities for women in the STEM field

The joint project CHEFIN (with the subprojects "Development of the technical recommendation system" of RWTH Aachen University and "Quantitative and qualitative accompanying research for career factors" of TU Dortmund University) pursues the goal of providing female STEM students, female career starters in the STEM field, and female young professionals who have already entered a profession in the STEM field with confidence regarding their own professional identity and thus supporting highly qualified women on their career path to the top of companies and public institutions.

For this purpose, qualitative and quantitative methods are combined in a mixed method approach, by which current success and inhibiting factors for the career paths of women in the STEM sector are researched and analyzed. The core of the project is the "Competence Development Recommender" (CDR), an innovative tool that automatically provides users with tailored recommendations for career development. Based on a Big Data analysis of XING CVs in the STEM sector, a technical system is being developed in which women can link their electronic XING CVs and as a result receive comparative results, recommendations for improvement and positive reinforcement regarding their achievements and qualifications made so far.  The CDR will be available free of charge to all interested parties. The results enable a realistic assessment of one's own CV and thus reinforce the aforementioned confidence with regard to one's own professional identity. In addition, the results are useful for career planning, as they provide the user with individual recommendations based on the success and inhibiting factors identified in the project for career paths of women in STEM fields, which are neatly presented in a "Competence Roadmap".