An incomplete mapping of the skills of a given individual, combined with insufficient insight into a company's actual need for competence, give rise to quite a few challenges. For instance, it may lead to hiring the wrong candidates, lack of insight into the best path for personal development and challenges when deciding relevant content for courses, learning material and for continued education.

UPSKILL will introduce a global platform for professional networking. The platform will connect individuals, companies and learning providers, and offer automatic methods for identification, mapping, and development of skills and abilities.

The project will result in new methods for representing the skills of an individual, mapping a company's need for competence, as well as new methods for matching available skills and abilities with the actual need for
competence. The methods will be self-learning, applicable for commercial use and independent of industry.

As a result, the UPSKILL platform will lead to simplified and less expensive hiring and restructuring processes, reduced risk of hiring wrong candidates, free competence guidance for individuals, and content recommendation for learning providers. The platform will be launched in Europe and Southeast Asia after project completion.

Simula’s Role

Simula plays a central role in designing and developing data-driven algorithms for the automatic and unbiased hiring process, identification of individual’s competence profile from available data sources, and development of matching algorithms for potential employees and employers. The developed methods will form a solid foundation for the UPSKILL platform.

Funding source

Research Council of Norway, BIA

All partners

Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering

Oslo Metropolitan University

University of South-Eastern Norway

Coordinator

Conexus AS