The Knowledge Management And Automatic Competence

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

These days due to the high competition between in the industrial sector, companies tend to investigate new ways of using the human resources more efficient which could lead to lower costs. A way to do this, is to analyze the human competencies and the knowledge. Also, lifelong learning is important in employment, the economic success and also to the integration in the society.

Another chapter to this is the Knowledge Management and Automatic competence.

Knowledge Management (KM) focuses on the competitive advantage in human resources thus many companies may pay attention to the advantage of human resources by taking benefit of Knowledge management. By using formal languages and ontologies merged with semantics gives the ability to automatic systems to overcome some limits peculiar to less expressive sorts of knowledge representation.

While the economy during the late 90’s saw great growth, the technology of e-recruiting had an increasing demand of highly qualified employees that could not be satisfied by the labor market. Cost savings, information richness and efficiency were some of the most important advantages that contributed to the rapid and also successful adoption of e-recruiting system.

A system that could give an advantage to Human Resources is a learner profile system. There are two learner profiles, one is the IEEE Personal and Private Information (PAPI) and the other also important specification is the IMS Learner Information Package (LIP). In order to make the information of learner profiles flexible to store them, there is where PAPI and LIP.

Europass is a Curriculum Vitae(CV) in a standardized form that enables users to document their qualification development profile systematically and chronologically. It also gives the ability to the user to store information about their skills, work experience, personal details and competencies that each one has in a standarised document that they could use across Europe without any national constraints

A project that tried to deal with many problems of e-recruiting based on competency management is the CommOnCV. The CommOnCV allows a job seeker or a recruiter to acknowledge and represent any competencies that may underlie in its resume or CV.

The aim of this proposal is to study the competence management system and the impact to the Human resources and also point out the benefits that competence management provides and investigate a way to improve the efficiency and the opportunity of interoperability. There will be also a development of Web-Based and open sourced interoperable competency management software that analyzes a standardized Europass CV form and provide critical information to the Human Resources in order to overcome e-recruiting problems.

Research aim and objectives.

The research aim of this proposal is an advanced study of a competence management system and the implementation of interoperable software. More specifically the aim of the study is to analyze the impact of the competency-based management to the Human Resources and the problems that e-recruitment is facing due to the fast growth through the past years. In this paper we will also investigate a way to overcome any potential problems that spotted during the research and the related work with the implementation of new interoperable Web-Based open source software that overcomes some of the problems that e-recruiting is facing.

The objectives are:

To review and investigate the Literature Review

To acknowledge potential problems

To identify a way to overcome the problems

To implement of the software

Significance

The significance of this project is to study the problems that competence-based management and e-recruitment is facing these years and introduce a new software tool that have the potential to overcome most of the mayor problems that competence-based management and e-recruiting is facing

Literature Review

Competence-based Management

These days due to the high competition between in the industrial sector, companies tend to investigate new ways of using the human resources more efficient which could lead to lower costs. More specifically and in order to do that, the human competencies and the knowledge should be analyzed.The scope of Competency Management is the significance of measuring and predicting of a set of indoor attributes that could react on the performance and success in executing a particular role inside a system and map to a diagnostic target (Sanghi, 2007)

The result of these attributes could be skills, abilities, capacity, motivation, knowledge and more. Based on a research between many studies and publications (Bohlouli, Ansari and Fathi, 2012) , Competence Management is a result of 7 different steps. First is the identification and audit of current competencies. The second step is the ability to define the new competencies. The third step is about the analysis of the gaps. In the forth step the main component of Competency Management, competency mapping is fulfilled. If the above steps were completed in a successful way, it will lead in a recommendation tool and Learning Management Component (LMC). Recommendation tool gives a computerized recommendations to the users based on their competencies that have been measured. (Bohlouli, Ansari and Fathi, 2012), (Ljungquist, 2007)

In a world that is changing quickly, lifelong learning is important in employment, the economic success and also to the integration in the society. Education and training are institutionally recognized in European Union by the Lesbon Strategy(2000) (Lisbon Strategy, 2000) and its successor Europe 2020(2010)(European Commision, 2010) as very important. The Lisbon Strategy (2000) is mainly regarded as a failure, but sure not because of the concept of learning economy.(Cubic, Pivac and Skugor, 2012)

This concept, learning economy, assumes that in modern economies knowledge is considered as crucial resource and as one of the most important process, the learning. The Europe 2010 that is parted in 7 initiatives, one of the most important focuses to provide to the people the necessary skills for jobs of today but also for feature jobs (European Commission, 2010). The strategies that Europe adopted for economic growth have conducted concepts that have been proven already successful in enterprises. The past 20 years, human resources management in enterprises have shifted to strategic management of human resources from the now obsolete measuring of individual productivity (Munkvold and Hustad, 2005). Competence Management includes the implementation, evaluation and planning of the initiatives and in that way is able to guarantee sufficient competencies of the employees and also the ability of the company to reach the objectives. With the help of the Web, there is the ability to redistribute the human resources activities with the competence management from the HR department to the entire company.(Cubic, Pivac and Skugor, 2012)

Knowledge Management and Automatic Competence

Knowledge Management (KM) focuses on the competitive advantage in human resources so it is reasonable that knowledge intensive companies may pay attention to the advantage of human resources by taking benefit of Knowledge management. To use efficient the Knowledge Management there are many methodologies that have been proposed whose effect on the company’s investments is considered as valuable as any other material assets. An extra attention has been provided to identify the capabilities that lead many companies to business success and some approaches have been introduced and classified to undertake a particular problem.(Hafeez, Zhang and Malak, 2002), (Colucci et al, 2011)

Some difficulties may be caused when using automated management of knowledge despite material assets. A drawback is the subjectivity and intangibility typical of knowledge: the information of the personnel competence needs to also take negative information into account and to clearly interpret the domain vocabulary.

By using formal languages and ontologies merged with semantics gives the ability to automatic systems to overcome some limits peculiar to less expressive sorts of knowledge representation. Furthermore, defining and adopting reasoning services exploiting explicit information description to infer new knowledge is enabled by the right choice of formal languages. (Colucci et al, 2011)

E-recruitment

The late 90’s was the decade that the economy saw great growth also the technology of e-recruiting had an increasing demand while the demand of highly qualified employees could not be satisfied by the labor market (Lin B. and Stasinskaya V.S., 2002), (Thomas and Ray, 2000). The companies had to redesign their recruiting procedures in order to move as fast as they could to web-based integrated human resource systems in order to benefit from the standardized frameworks for key personnel procedures (Cullen, 2001).

According to IDC(www.idc.com), $260 billion was the corporate investment on e-commerce in 2000. From Brick and mortar companies came more than 85% of this investment.(Lee, 2005) Information Technology is one of the most important costs in most businesses and as also the statistics shows, IT must have an extra attention from the management. Many businesses, despite their size had to realize that the key is to put their funds on business opportunities through the development of Information Systems. Cost savings, information richness and efficiency were some of the most important advantages that contributed to the rapid and also successful adoption of e-recruiting system in advantage of both recruiters and job seekers (Lee, 2005). E-recruiting also gives the ability of instant and almost costless global dissemination of available jobs to the entire world without any geographical constraints. Nevertheless, business should pay attention in not overinvest in e-recruiting systems. The majority of the companies face e-recruiting systems as a resource critical to their strategy although they should focus in developing a mathematic based model of online recruiting system in order to be able to analyze and evaluate different ways of e-recruiting. (Lee, 2005)

LIP/PAPI

Despite the growing usage of learner profiles around the world and after many efforts, learner profiles are not yet standardized. Learner profiles consist mainly from 2 specifications. One is the IEEE Personal and Private Information (PAPI) (IEEE, 2001) and the other also important specification is the IMS Learner Information Package (LIP) (IMS, 2012). In order to make the information of learner profiles flexible to store them, there e of PAPI and LIP take action to determine a standard exchange protocol, this will give the ability of easy manipulation of the data such as advanced search, flexible storage and fast access. Despite that both standards are about the same scope there are significant differences. Personal And Private Information (PAPI) mainly focuses in a way that could give the ability to track the learner’s performance as quick as possible using categories such as performance, relation to other learners and portfolio and in order to do so keep the information set to minimum. Keeping the information to minimum have the disadvantage that the PAPI protocol is not able to cover some learner’s features that could be useful to make recommendations or filtering in adaptive systems (Dolog and Nejdl, 2003)

On the other hand, Learner Information Package(LIP) make use of a much more rich information set and takes into consideration much more features and interest in order to describe the learner’s characteristics and it is extensible.(Chatti et al, 2005)

Europass

Europass is a Curriculum Vitae(CV) in a standardized form that enables users to document their qualification development profile systematically and chronologically. It also gives the ability to the user to store information about their skills, work experience, personal details and competencies that each one has in a standarised document that they could use across Europe without any national constraints. The job seeker can fill the form of the Europass online in any European language and in different formats like PDF,XML etc. This makes the Europass a great tool with great transparency of the competencies and the qualifications of the job seekers or the recruiters.(Karaa and Mhimdi, 2011)

Some of the categories of information that Europass contains are:

Personal Information: This section Contains the name of the applicant and their contact information

Job applied for: Allows the applicant to specify his job target

Work Experience: The user can describe his work experience

Education and training: Here the applicant can describe his qualification, education and tanning and principal/occupation skills.

Personal skills: The user can fill in the languages and his skills on them

Communication skills: The user can describe his communication skils

Orginizational/managerial skills: The applicant is able to describe his organizational and managerial skills.

Job Related Skills: Describes the job related skills

Computer Skills: Describes the computer skills of the applicant

Additional Information: In this section the applicant is able to fill in any other relevant information

Annexes: Inventories any items attached

(EUROPASS, 2013)

Related Work

Another project that focuses on the problems of e-recruiting and tries to deal with them by introducing a new approach that is based on the competency management is CommOnCV (Competency Management through Ontologies CV). The scope of the CommOnCV is to allow a job seeker or a recruiter to acknowledge and represent any competencies that may underlie in its resume or the CV. Competencies like skills, abilities, knowledge, motives and traits that are acquired by the job seeker and can be made explicit are also used in order to refine the process the relies between "supply and demand". All the competencies correspond to ontology-based annotations which basically can be represented by the semantic web languages. The CommOnCV project in order to achieve this first is based on a competency model and then to the management of competencies. (Harzallah, Leclere and Trichet, 2002)

Methodology

Every project in order to be qualified as a successful one and meet most of its objectives should have a methodology. The methodology to be selected should be depending upon the scope of the project, its requirements, its complexity and the time needed to be completed.

There are two diferent types of methodology, fixed and flexible. The fixed methodology is very close to the waterfall model. The advantage of this methodology is that if a problem is spotted early in the process it will be less cost effective to correct it. The disadvantage is that if the problem is spotted after the end of the process while the next one is in progress, the whole project will be on a risk to be delayed. The flexible methodology is something like the Agile model. This methodology model gives the ability to always alter the data of the previous process without the risk of failure or the delay of the whole project.

Because of the complexity of the project the methodology model that will be followed is a combination of a Waterfall and Agile like models with the steps of planning, analysis, design, implementation and testing. This combination will provide the flexibility to modify the previous process while you are working on the next one with the minimum cost possible time wise.

The main purpose of this research is to study and analyze the impact of the competency management to the Human Resources and the problems e-recruitment is facing due to the fast growth through the past years. In this paper we will also investigate a way to overcome any potential problems that identified during the review of the research and the related work. Next, there will be the implementation of new interoperable Web-Based and open source software. The software will make use of a standardized Europass CV form to store the personal details and the competencies of a job seeker. The software will give the ability to the Human Resources (HR) management for a fast access and manipulation of the recruiter’s information in benefit of statistics and many more. The tool will also have the ability to compare and contrast the competencies of the job seeker that applied with his Europass CV to the company for the job opening with the requirements of the job and inform the Human Resources management if the applicant is qualified for the job and the matching percentage of the requirements.

After the analysis and the determination of the requirements based on the research and the related work, the implemented tool as mentioned before it will be Web-Based and open sourced in order to be available to everyone with the ability to improve it and free to use. The tool should be also easy to use without requiring any additional training to the staff that will be using it.