Workforce Upskilling: A History-Based Approach for Recommending Unfamiliar Process Activities

Human resource allocation decisions have a direct impact on the performance of a business process. Many approaches to optimal resource allocation have been proposed in the Business Process Management community. The majority of these approaches aim to optimise process performance; hence, recommend activities to experienced employees. To remain competitive, modern organisations also need to grow the capabilities of their employees and offer them upskilling opportunities. In this article, we propose an approach for recommending unfamiliar activities to employees by comparing their work histories with work histories of other similar employees. The aim of the proposed approach is to put employees on a gradual path of multi-skilling whereby they are provided with an opportunity to perform unfamiliar process activities and thus gain their experience through learning-by-doing. The approach is based on the analysis of process execution data and has been implemented. In the evaluation, we compared recommendations provided by the approach with actual activity executions of different employees recorded in process data. The evaluation demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach for different publicly available event logs and configuration settings.