Abstract:

Motivation. The most important resource of high-tech service-oriented companies (HSOC) is personnel possessing key competencies, namely technical knowledge, technical skills, innovative activity, creativity, responsibility for the result. The dominant role in gaining these competencies belongs to informal means of workplace learning. Unlike the formal, they rely on the activism of the employee himself and develops his creativity and responsibility in solving specific professional tasks, which is critically important for HSOC. However, as the analysis has shown, non-formal learning in its present is implemented as a largely spontaneous process, i.e., in essence, it remains uncontrollable and exits the sphere of managing the staff development. To overcome these shortcoming, instrumental and informational support tools for non-formal workplace learning of HSOC personnel are needed being integrated into the employee’s actual workflow.

Methods. As a base, a model of workplace learning (R.L. Jacobs) is used. To identify workplace learning ways that best provide the needed competencies of HSOC personnel, the rough sets theory is used. For modeling the workplace dialogue with the employee, the methods of formal concept analysis and of relational concepts analysis are used. To monitor the effectiveness of employee’s learning process based on their current activity on the Internet, we use machine learning methods, namely latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), enhanced by additive regularization of thematic models (ARTM).

Main Results. It is shown that for key specialists at HSOC of “Professional” and “Expert” levels the following ways of learning are most effective: daily work experiences, knowledge sharing with the team, and web search. As a means of supporting non-formal workplace learning of personnel, a method has been developed for teaching how to configure network infrastructure, which provides a more complete immersion of users in a real-work environment. For answering employees' professional questions the dialog system was built. The system simultaneously supports taxonomic and non-taxonomic relations between the data, which allows for the formation of the answer to take into account not only the information from official technical documents, but also the expertise of the most competent technical specialists. Based on LDA and ARTM, a method for estimating employee behavior deviations from effective Internet search scenarios has been developed. The method is used for non-formally train employees to build their own effective search strategy, as well as for creating a corpus of information and training materials for training new employees or for selecting content on a desired topic. The developed methods and systems were used in workplace learning of key technical staff in a large IT company for six months. The obtained improvement in key performance indicators was from 31 to 54%.

Practical Relevance. The developed complex of methods and software systems implementing them is applied directly at employees' workplaces and as part of the implementation of real production tasks, which creates effective conditions for managing the training of HSOC personnel based on the results of their current professional activity.

Keywords:

Workplace learning, high-tech service-oriented company, non-formal learning, staff development, integrated instrumental and informational support tools.