Mediated Competency Comparison between Job Descriptions and University Courses

Abstract

-In order to establish and maintain IT empowered cooperation between universities and industrial organizations; on the one hand universities should be informed about trends in the labour market, and on the other hand industrial organizations should have an insight into trends of knowledge development in universities. Furthermore, taking into consideration that a competency is becoming a kind of "currency" in the labour market, there is a need to compare competency demand from the industrial organizations and competency offer from the universities in order to see if the university can satisfy competency needs of industrial organizations. The use of competency frameworks and mappings between competency frameworks can facilitate information exchange about the competencies. The paper describes the method and the prototype for mediated competency comparison with respect to job descriptions and university courses. The prototype conforms to the architecture of collaboration support system and its services that have been designed with the purpose to maintain and exchange information between universities and industrial organizations.

Monitoring Services to Support Continuous Curriculum Engineering

“…We found and experimented with several knowledge structures for representing knowledge, skills, and competences, e.g., "Computing Classification System" taxonomy provided by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM-CCS) [37], European Dictionary of Skills and Competencies (DISCO) [38], European e-Competence framework (e-CF) [39], and tools and technologies defined by the American Occupation Information Network program "O*NET" [40]. A detailed description of the use of these knowledge structures for edu d/o monitoring is described in detail in [10]- [14].…”

“…Data reading from data bases, Web crawling, data downloading, and manual data entry into the system are the monitoring methods used in the information retrieval subfunction. As edu d/o information source document analysis is a text analysis task, the information analysis sub-function includes natural language processing, namely, text analysis and concept based (i.e., using knowledge structures [10]) information source processing and mapping. For the information distribution sub-function, similar to other monitoring systems, specialized user interfaces and portals with search and browsing facilities can be used.…”

“…The base service model has been tailored to different use scenarios of the monitoring system that go even beyond continuous curriculum engineering (for instance, the use of the system for selecting subjects by employers was considered). Different aspects of this model are described in detail in [8], [10], [11], [14], [16], and [17]. The variability aspects of a system's functional structure and its behavior initially were discussed in [18]- [22].…”

“…Separate details of this research have been already gradually published in [8] and [10]- [22] along with the more than five years long concept and software development process. This article gives a holistic view on the research work done and adds the experience of the use of the monitoring services after putting them into the operation.…”