Patent Application
20140207534
The invention generally relates to technologies for automatically assessing the skills and training for a particular job or project, and for identifying any additional training or certification which may be necessary to comply with contractual or regulatory requirements.
Many roles, jobs, positions and professions require various training and certifications beyond degrees, certificates and diplomas offered by educational institutions. Some of these training and certification requirements are one-time in nature, while others require periodic renewal and updating. Whether you are a teacher and you must complete updated certification in subject ranging from educational techniques to proper handling of infectious diseases among students, or a programmer who requires updated certification to maintain credentials for a particular software product, or an insurance agent who must complete ethics and confidential information handling training, these requirements can be driven by corporate standards, by professional group rules (bar association, medical association, etc.), or by law.
Multiple certification processes required by teams across large companies and organizations which have no standard certification process or tracking mechanism for managers to ensure compliance by their teams presents a problem, both in efficacy and efficiency. Managers may be required to manually to compile status reports, analyze budget requirements, and review pertinent corporate, contractual, professional and legal standards.
Required certifications and education for each member of a group are automatically scanned. Current certifications and educational requirements are compared against the current job function, skills, and location for each member of the group, such as for each employee of a department of a company. These statuses and requirements are assigned into a management and employee portal or dashboard based according to pre-defined requirements. The portal or dashboard is also populated to provide specific requirements for unmet or under-met requirements, and tracking of the progress of certifications is enabled for both managers and employees to be proactive in taking action on certifications and education.
The description set forth herein is illustrated by the several drawings.
a illustrates an example encoding of a user profile.
b sets forth an example encoding of a requirements set.
a shows an example encoding of the results of amelioration analysis.
b illustrates a dashboard display.
The inventors of the present and the related invention have recognized problems not yet recognized by those skilled in the relevant arts. As previously stated in this disclosure, many roles, jobs, positions and professions require various training and certifications beyond degrees, certificates and diplomas offered by educational institutions. Some of these training and certification requirements are one-time in nature, while others require periodic renewal and updating. Whether you are a teacher and you must complete updated certification in subject ranging from educational techniques to proper handling of infectious diseases among students, or a programmer who requires updated certification to maintain credentials for a particular software product, or an insurance agent who must complete ethics and confidential information handling training, these requirements can be driven by corporate standards, by professional group rules (bar association, medical association, etc.), or by law.
Multiple certification processes required by teams across large companies and organizations which have no standard certification process or tracking mechanism for managers to ensure compliance by their teams presents a problem, both in efficacy and efficiency. Managers may spend hours trying manually to compile status reports, analyze budget requirements, and review pertinent corporate, contractual, professional and legal standards.
The present inventors have recognized a number of problems not fully addressed by certification and training tracking systems. Some of these problems and limitations appear to be unrecognized in the art, including:
Furthermore, because these certification systems all use different processes and different tools, the cost involved to host and support each individual certification tool/process is taxing on the organizations infrastructure.
The present inventors have recognized that there is a lack of a portal or dashboard to show what is required, when it is required, and what is required of each member of an organization, and their management team, in terms of actual training, certification, calendar demands and budgetary requirements.
Here is an example of the foregoing problems taken from an actual set of events. A company, whose name shall be withheld, instituted an Intellectual Property training and certification requirements. In this example, the IP education certification process was handled through email notifications to employees, who were directed to a website that required the employee to watch a video and then to click on a link at the very end of the video to certify that they had completed the process. Problems and weaknesses of this particular training process included:
Because the delinquency reminder message was sent 50 days after the initial deadline, and because there was no tool to view certifications status by the employee or the manager, neither was enabled to act proactively to ensure certification compliance if the first email was not seen or was buried in an to-do list.
Many embodiments according to the present invention will share a general concept, but not particularly all embodiments will include this general concept, which is to automatically scan required certifications and education for each member of a group, and to automatically compare those current certifications and educational requirements against the current job function, skills, and location. Then, these statuses and requirements are assigned into a management and employee portal or dashboard based on what is matched based on pre-defined requirements. The portal or dashboard is also populated to provide specific requirements for unmet or under-met requirements, and tracking of the progress of certifications is enabled for both managers and employees to be proactive in taking action on certifications and education.
The benefits of and advantages of embodiments of the invention include significant cost and resource savings, creation of a single location where all certifications leverage the same processes, considerable reduction in infrastructure (servers, network bandwidth, and support team time) demands, and provision of a single tool for managers and group members to view overdue, lapsed, current, etc., requirements to enhance compliance, and to allow longer range planning and budgeting.
Systems and methods according to the present invention identify and track certification requirements based on defined criteria of what would be required, including the attributes and properties of the certifications (prerequisites, proactive recommendations for career development, tracking certification renewal requirements, expirations, etc.). The solution also dynamically updates the requirements if the person's information changes that would exclude them from the requirements that are no longer applicable.
General Architecture.
Referring to
Analytics Engine.
An analytics engine (106) is used to proactively scan required certifications and compare them against the User Profile (job function, skills, location, etc.) of an employee and assign into a management and employee portal or dashboard based on what is matched based on pre-defined requirements. At least one point of novelty of embodiments according to the present invention relative to the current state of the art is in having the processing engine passively monitor the users' profiles to generate the certifications that would be deemed required based on predefined criteria.
Learning Engine.
A learning engine (105) is utilized to update the processing engine, which feeds into an Aggregated Certification repository, in order to update and redefine certification programs being recommended based on the activity and/or lack of activity drawn from the analytics engine. The system will be constantly learning and updating automatically based on activity of the user and users with similar profile criteria and data.
A benefit of such embodiments is in in having an automated system to evaluate, track, and assess certifications and their status, enabling managers to see the status of across the entire team for all certifications. Creating a single location where all certifications leverage the same processes, servers and support team is anticipated to drastically decrease hardware, network and personnel costs. Furthermore, a single tool that provides managers and employees a view into overdue, current, lapsed, and upcoming certifications is anticipated to significantly increase the efficiency of managers and employees.
Such embodiments may also make comparisons regarding the time investment and program cost, and apply those against the employees' profiles to determine if the return on investment would be validated. For example, in some embodiments, the system would not provide recommendations for advanced certifications to a group member who is either below a threshold of performance, or who might not be engaged in the role for a minimum amount of future time (e.g. temporary employees, loaner employees, interns, etc.)
Exemplary User Profiles.
In this example embodiment, a User Profile definition (102) includes:
a illustrates a possible eXtensible Markup Language (XML) implementation of a user profile data structure.
In this example embodiment, an Aggregated Certification Repository definition includes:
Exemplary Aggregated Certification Repository.
b illustrates a possible XML implementation of such an Aggregated Requirements Repository. In at least one embodiment, a user interface is provided to view, create, and/or edit these items.
Output of Processing Engine.
The product and output of the processing engine (103) of various embodiments of the present invention may include at least two items, the first of which is a data structure populated with information, such as data records, which define a user's certification requirements, and the second of which is a user interface display or “dashboard” which the user or the user's manager may view these certification requirements.
Regarding the first item of output, one embodiment includes a prioritized itemized list of requirements based on intelligence gained from different resources, such as, such as the employee's certification calendar (i.e. prioritize education that would be required for certifications that are expiring first), the employee's desired career path and aspirations, and the company's financial climate. Prioritization may take the form of weighting each item based on importance.
According to at least one exemplary embodiment, the dashboard or portal user interfaces (104) provide user certification information that would enable users and their managers to make a decision based on intelligence gathered. For managers, this information may include visibility to the frequency of the certification (annual, quarterly, monthly, etc.), an explanation as to why the certification is required, detail on what is required to certify or comply (i.e. all employees must comply, or only certain employees using a certain tool must comply, etc.). Both dashboards for managers and employees may display pending actions requiring attention (due date, description of actions required, etc.), an updated status of employee(s) certifications so that managers can follow-up prior to employees being delinquent, and a timeline of when items are due so that managers can plan with employees to ensure timely completion or complete them ahead of time if employee will be on vacation, out on leave, etc.
For example,
Exemplary Analytics and Learning Engine Operations.
According to at least one embodiment of the present invention, an analytics engine is utilized to compare the outstanding certification and education requirements to monitor the activity (clicks, frequency, etc.), to provide metrics and analysis to management and employees on status (as applicable), to monitor activity reporting, and to determine and predict why action has not been taken on outstanding items based on information gathered by learning engine on reason for incomplete status and suggest alternatives based on the analysis.
A learning engine is utilized to monitor the activity (or non-activity) taken by users to provide comparisons on activity of user against recommendations based on trends found (i.e. division XY, no one takes class due to cost restrictions so will remove the suggestion from the future profiles), to provide incompletion status reasons (i.e. cost restrictions, lack of time, minimum skill level not met, etc.), to learn what actions were taken on recommendations, to show completion rate and time to completion, and to compare completion status based on user profile categories (i.e. band level, job role, etc.).
To provide a mechanism for managers to determine the likelihood that their employee would be eligible to participate in a certification program, an example logical process includes tracking a particular criteria measurement of compliance or goal reaching amelioriation index Ia:
where:
Suitable Computing Platform.
The preceding paragraphs have set forth example logical processes according to the present invention, which, when coupled with processing hardware, embody systems according to the present invention, and which, when coupled with tangible, computer readable memory devices, embody computer program products according to the related invention.
Regarding computers for executing the logical processes set forth herein, it will be readily recognized by those skilled in the art that a variety of computers are suitable and will become suitable as memory, processing, and communications capacities of computers and portable devices increases. In such embodiments, the operative invention includes the combination of the programmable computing platform and the programs together. In other embodiments, some or all of the logical processes may be committed to dedicated or specialized electronic circuitry, such as Application Specific Integrated Circuits or programmable logic devices.
The present invention may be realized for many different processors used in many different computing platforms.
Many such computing platforms, but not all, allow for the addition of or installation of application programs (501) which provide specific logical functionality and which allow the computing platform to be specialized in certain manners to perform certain jobs, thus rendering the computing platform into a specialized machine. In some “closed” architectures, this functionality is provided by the manufacturer and may not be modifiable by the end-user.
The “hardware” portion of a computing platform typically includes one or more processors (504) accompanied by, sometimes, specialized co-processors or accelerators, such as graphics accelerators, and by suitable computer readable memory devices (RAM, ROM, disk drives, removable memory cards, etc.). Depending on the computing platform, one or more network interfaces (505) may be provided, as well as specialty interfaces for specific applications. If the computing platform is intended to interact with human users, it is provided with one or more user interface devices (507), such as display(s), keyboards, pointing devices, speakers, etc. And, each computing platform requires one or more power supplies (battery, AC mains, solar, etc.).
The terminology used herein is for the purpose of describing particular embodiments only and is not intended to be limiting of the invention. As used herein, the singular forms “a”, “an” and “the” are intended to include the plural forms as well, unless the context clearly indicates otherwise. It will be further understood that the terms “comprises” and/or “comprising,” when used in this specification, specify the presence of stated features, steps, operations, elements, and/or components, but do not preclude the presence or addition of one or more other features, steps, operations, elements, components, and/or groups thereof, unless specifically stated otherwise.
The corresponding structures, materials, acts, and equivalents of all means or step plus function elements in the claims below are intended to include any structure, material, or act for performing the function in combination with other claimed elements as specifically claimed. The description of the present invention has been presented for purposes of illustration and description, but is not intended to be exhaustive or limited to the invention in the form disclosed. Many modifications and variations will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art without departing from the scope and spirit of the invention. The embodiment was chosen and described in order to best explain the principles of the invention and the practical application, and to enable others of ordinary skill in the art to understand the invention for various embodiments with various modifications as are suited to the particular use contemplated.
It should also be recognized by those skilled in the art that certain embodiments utilizing a microprocessor executing a logical process may also be realized through customized electronic circuitry performing the same logical process(es).
It will be readily recognized by those skilled in the art that the foregoing example embodiments do not define the extent or scope of the present invention, but instead are provided as illustrations of how to make and use at least one embodiment of the invention. The following claims define the extent and scope of at least one invention disclosed herein.
