Enterprise Employee Training via Project Team Formation

Professional career training for novice employees at elementary levels to help them master necessary working skills is critical for both achieving employees' professional success and enhancing the enterprise growth. Besides adopting professional services from external career training agencies, companies can actually train the employees more effectively by involving them in various internal projects carried out in the companies. In this paper, we will study the "Employee Training" (ET) problem by assigning the employees to various concrete company internal projects. From the company perspective, besides training the employees, another important objective of carrying out these projects is to finish them successfully. The successful accomplishment of projects depends on various issues, like the skill qualification of the built teams and the effective collaboration among the team members. To achieve these two objectives simultaneously, a novel framework named "Team foRmAtion based employee traINing" (TRAIN) is proposed in this paper. TRAIN formulates the ET problem as a joint optimization problem, where the objective function considers the employees' overall skill gain and the team internal communication costs at the same time. To ensure the success of the projects, a new team skill qualification constraint is proposed and added to the optimization problem. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world enterprise employee project team dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of TRAIN in addressing the problem.