AI-Powered Career Guidance Aligned with NEP 2020:A Personalized and Scalable Platform for Student Empowerment

Traditional career counseling methods are no longer enough to meet the need of today's fast changing industries. Because of this, many students struggle to understand what skills they need and how to prepare for their future careers. To address this issue, this paper presents a mobile-based, AI powered career guidance platform which aligns with India's National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. The proposed system provides a practical and scalable way to support students in choosing the right career path and develop their skills. Random Forest is a machine learning model that generates personalized career suggestions. It analyzes different aspects of a student's background such as academic performance, subject strengths, technical skills, and completed certifications to deliver recommendations. During evaluation, the model's performance was high, achieving about 0.95 accuracy and an F1-score of 0.95, better than several other commonly used classification algorithms. The key contribution of this work is the development of a unified system that combines predictive analytics, student-mentor interaction, and tailored learning resources. By bringing these elements together, the platform helps learners make informed and confident dabout their future careers.