Every week, careers advisers in the Barwon region wade through policy PDFs, outdated spreadsheets and half-finished web portals just to answer questions like “Where can I send a Year 10 student who’s keen on health science?” or “Which employers still take first-year VCAL?”
The information is out there, Department of Education guidelines, Local Learning and Employment Network (LLEN) industry-immersion notes, individual TAFE and employer listings; but it’s scattered across dozens of sources, updated at different times and written in language students rarely understand.
The result? Missed opportunities, frustrated teachers and young people making decisions in the dark.
Barwon Education Consultant (BEC) is a custom large-language-model (LLM) chat assistant embedded on the Geelong Region Local Learning and Employment Network (GRLLEN) website.
It ingests a large amount of existing education ecosystem PDFs, local provider pages and work-placement listings, then serves concise, source-linked answers to school Careers Advisers in seconds.
Disciplines
AI Consulting
Custom LLM pipeline
Vector database design
Prompt engineering & safety guard-rails
Conversational UI/UX
Analytics & feedback loop
The Challenge
Fragmented ecosystem. Hundreds of active work-placement listings sit across multiple portals for Victorian students alone, with new opportunities appearing daily.
Time-poor advisers. Career teachers juggle classes, admin and guidance for hundreds of students. Finding the latest placement or VET pathway can take hours.
Information gap. National and state bodies acknowledge the struggle to keep advice current and cohesive across schools, industry and government.
The Solution
The thinking
To cut through the noise we needed a single, trustworthy brain that could understand local nuance – not just generic job data. Surface authoritative sources so advisers feel confident sharing answers. Improve itself continually via real-world feedback.
The concept
A trained, domain-specific LLM (GPT-4-class) was fine-tuned on:
- DE & GRLLEN program guides
- Work-placement feeds, apprenticeship boards & local community NFPs andl TAFE offerings
- Relevant legislation, awards and insurance documents
The Result
Within the first month, the BEC page attracted a high number of return users, with users spending an average of over 3.5 minutes engaging with the chat assistant, a strong signal that careers advisers are finding what they need and sticking around for answers.
Advisers report saving hours each week by getting instant, source-linked responses they can confidently pass on to students. This has started to shift GRLLEN’s website from being just a static information hub into an interactive, high-trust tool that teachers actually enjoy using.
“For the first time, we can give careers advisors a clear, reliable answer in under a minute, and we can connect them with relevant, local providers as well as giving them further resources on the provider website. It’s a game-changer for how schools connect students with work experience opportunities.”
— Wayne Elliott, Executive Officer, Geelong Region Local Learning and Employment Network.