How do you help someone choose a career when you offer 350 options? This talk shows how we turned overwhelming NHS career data into a guided, personalised journey ,using Drupal to model complexity and design for uncertainty.

Prerequisite

No specific prerequisites are required. Familiarity with CMS platforms and how digital teams use them to serve diverse user audiences will help attendees get the most from this session. Some experience with Drupal content modelling or UX design is beneficial but not essential.

Target Audience

Anyone curious about how Drupal is used to solve real,world problems at scale, whether you work in development, design, strategy, or just want to see what a complex public sector Drupal project looks like in practice.

Outline

How do you help someone choose a career when you offer 350 options?

NHS Health Careers serves one of the UK's most diverse digital audiences, from a 14-year-old picking GCSEs to a clinician pivoting careers. With 350+ roles, 1,000+ courses, and five legacy sites being merged into one, the challenge wasn't building a platform. It was designing a system that helps people answer: "What should I do with my life?"

This talk walks through how we approached that problem, and built the answer in Drupal.

We'll cover how we structured complex content relationships to make personalisation possible, designed guided discovery tools that replace overwhelming choice with intentional journeys, and integrated an external career-matching quiz API for both anonymous and authenticated users.

The result: a personalised careers hub with a gamified career planner, contextual content filtering, and a homepage that adapts to each user's goals, interests, and qualifications.

The lessons are transferable:

Structure your content model before you design personalisation

Reduce cognitive load; more options rarely mean a better experience

Drupal is strongest when it's modelling complexity, not just rendering pages

Whether you work in public sector, education, or any large-scale content platform, this session will show you how Drupal can turn structural complexity into human clarity.

Learning Objectives

Attendees will see how:

Drupal's content modelling made personalisation possible ,How structuring careers, courses, and progression pathways as related entities gave the platform the foundation to serve each user differently.

Drupal powered guided discovery at scale ,How Search API, Solr, faceted filtering, and Paragraphs replaced 350+ career listings with intentional, contextual user journeys.

A custom Drupal module bridged an external career-matching API ,How we integrated the CASCAID quiz API for both anonymous and authenticated users, handling identity, session state, and frontend data delivery end-to-end.

Drupal enabled personalisation without AI ,How well-structured content and deliberate UX ,not machine learning ,powered a homepage and career planner that adapted to each user's goals and qualifications.

Drupal brought five legacy sites into one coherent platform ,How Drupal's flexibility and scalability made it the right choice for a public sector organisation managing a diverse, ever-growing national audience.

Experience level
Beginner