Chatbot Albi – Rethinking Career Guidance: AI-Powered Conversations for High School Students

Commissioned by the Bildungsforum Handwerk, think moto created Albi – a smart application coach chatbot that supports young people through engaging, interactive conversations.

Across Germany, many craft businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to fill apprenticeship positions. One reason: young people often hold outdated perceptions of skilled trades. While career guidance is still offered mainly in analog formats, today’s students rather expect accessible and interactive solutions.

With Albi, the goal was clear: provide 8th and 11th graders with a simple, accessible MVP solution tailored to their needs – and evaluate both acceptance and effectiveness in this key target group.

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To ensure the chatbot truly met the needs of young people, we combined a range of UX and research methods and directly translated our findings into the prompt architecture.

In the Discovery phase, we gathered valuable insights through workshops, surveys, and existing career tests. Building on this, the Define phase focused on shaping the core user intents and bot tasks.

A key success factor for both acceptance and engagement was creating a distinct chatbot personality – with its own behavior, recognizable voice, and characteristic look and feel. Albi listens, responds with empathy, offers practical tips, and feels approachable and familiar thanks to its design. During the Design phase, all these elements came together in a carefully crafted prompt structure, giving Albi a clear role and a consistent identity.

Unlike competitors that rely on long, tedious quizzes, Albi engages young people in short, focused conversations at eye level. The bot offers valuable tips for finding internships and provides practical support with application portfolios and cover letters. In doing so, Albi helps students recognize their own potential – while providing consistent guidance right up to the application stage.

Albi’s look reflects this personal and approachable experience. The design combines a rounded shape, symbolizing closeness and guidance, with an angular one that emphasizes the logical and practical side of skilled trades. Together, they form an upward-pointing arrow – a symbol of Albi showing young people the way forward. The visual identity is rounded off with a color palette inspired by vibrant nuances of the real world.

Albi was built on a scalable technical architecture with a well-structured prompt design at its core. On the frontend, a WordPress plugin seamlessly embeds the web chat and enables straightforward updates to the prompt structure.

Behind the scenes, an AWS cloud solution handles PDF generation and communication with Azure. For dialogue management, Azure OpenAI powers a robust language model, connected to a dedicated knowledge base. Throughout the process, ensuring GDPR compliance, stability, scalability, and cost efficiency was a top priority.

With Albi, career guidance becomes available anytime, anywhere. Young people can discover their potential, find motivation, and experience skilled trades as exciting and within reach. The high level of acceptance and measurable impact within the target group clearly underline the chatbot’s success.

Brand Design
Usability Testing
Minimal Viable Product
Conversational Design
Experience Strategie
UX/UI Design
Visual Design
Motion Design