5/20/2018 Recommending Career Plans Through AI Planning | Develop

Recommending Career Plans Through AI

Planning
Monday, 24. July 2017
By Kevin McAreavey, University of Bristol, UK
One of the aims of DEVELOP is to apply arti cial intelligence (AI) planning techniques to
recommend learning opportunities for career development. More speci cally, DEVELOP aims to
identify potential sequences of learning interventions (e.g. eLearning courses, mentorship,
changing teams) that will enable an individual to make progress towards the position(s) to which
they aspire.  The purpose of executing these learning interventions is to trigger desirable
changes to the individual’s (transversal) competencies (http://develop-
project.eu/news/Personality-as-determinant-for-competencies) and/or social capital
(http://develop-project.eu/news/computational-models-of-social-capital).  The application of
AI planning techniques will thus provide a personalised orchestration of existing learning
interventions, o ering a viable means for the individual to achieve their career goal(s).  From the
individual’s perspective, this will improve career awareness and facilitate internal mobility.  For
the organisation, this will optimise the use of existing learning resources, support talent
management, and reduce attrition rates through improved employee engagement.

Figure 1: Aspirational individuals and possible learning intervention paths

To some extent, previous research projects (e.g. WATCHME (http://www.project-watchme.eu/),
EmployID (http://employid.eu/), COLLAGE, PROLIX (http://www.prolixproject.org/)) and existing
commercial products (e.g. Insala Career Development (http://www.insala.com/career-
development-software.asp), SABA Talent Management (https://www.saba.com/)) have
attempted to address similar problems.  For example, PROLIX recommends learning
interventions based on the notion of a skills gap between an individual’s current competency
pro le and their desired competency pro le, where learning interventions are treated
independently (i.e. not as actions in a plan) and are assumed to have deterministic e ects on
competencies.  Similarly, SABA’s TIM™ software o ers a recommender system using machine
http://develop-project.eu/news/recommending-career-plans-through-AI-planning 1/4
5/20/2018 Recommending Career Plans Through AI Planning | Develop

learning techniques – similar to those employed by online retailers such as Amazon – but again
treats each learning intervention independently and thus ignores the potentially complex
interaction among learning interventions (e.g. dependencies, optimal sequences).  To the best of
our knowledge, no existing approach has attempted to address the problem holistically by
recommending entire plans using AI planning techniques, with a formal treatment of uncertainty
over the e ects of learning interventions and optimality of the solution.
A guiding principle of DEVELOP’s approach further distinguishes it from existing work: that plan
recommendations should be scrutable to the individual.  That is, both the recommendations
themselves and the reasons for the recommendations should be understandable to human
users.  This is essential for ensuring that an individual has trust in the system’s
recommendations, and thus that the system is providing recommendations that are actually of
bene t to the individual (i.e. to some extent, that the individual is likely to follow the
recommendations).  This principle has a number of implications on how we approach the
problem.  For example, while standard approaches to AI planning under uncertainty are capable
of generating optimal contingency plans (i.e. optimal policies), such formulations are not easily
understood by humans.  Similarly, while there are many sophisticated AI planning techniques for
generating optimal plans, few are capable of explaining why the plans are optimal.

Technically speaking, to solve these issues we rst treat the problem as a non-observable
Markov decision process (MDP) and apply conformant probabilistic planning techniques to
generate good sequences of learning interventions to achieve a speci ed career goal.  We will
then apply probabilistic event reasoning and argumentation frameworks as a means of
explaining the recommendations. The emphasis here is on generating simple plans that can be
easily understood by humans in terms of possible trajectories to a goal, with the primary
purpose being that of introspection.  By introspection, we mean a process in which the individual
can identify realistic career goals in terms of the probability that those goals can be achieved by
various strategies, and the cost associated with those strategies.  Similarly, it is hoped that this
process will encourage the individual to re ect on their own preferences, to better understand
how a career goal might be achieved, to identify sub-goals, and so on.  Such information, along
with historical information about the e ects of learning interventions, can then be used to
improve future plan recommendations via reinforcement learning.
Although simple sequences of learning interventions might fail (due to the potential for
undesirable outcomes of learning interventions), they do o er an initial strategy for the individual
to pursue; if and when the plan fails, online AI planning techniques can then be used to
optimally pursue the original goal.  Alternatively, new plan recommendations can be generated
as part of a process of plan revision, e.g. the individual may choose to continue pursuing the
original goal (making the process a form of replanning), or may choose a new goal to pursue. 
Thus, while we emphasise introspection, planning for the purpose of actually achieving a goal is
still a fundamental concern.
Although DEVELOP aims to recommend plans for career development, it does not attempt to
replace the expertise and insight of an experienced career guidance counsellor. It does,
however, o er the potential to enhance career guidance counselling sessions with clear

http://develop-project.eu/news/recommending-career-plans-through-AI-planning 2/4
5/20/2018 Recommending Career Plans Through AI Planning | Develop

evidence of what plans might be better than others as a means of achieving a speci c career
goal.
Find related articles on Social Capital (http://develop-project.eu/taxonomy/term/32) and
Competency Management (http://develop-project.eu/taxonomy/term/37) in our blog. You are
welcome to discuss this article on Medium
(https://medium.com/@develop.project.eu/recommending-career-plans-through-ai-planning-
a9bbf4e88895).
 
Tags: Articles (/news/articles) Arti cial Intelligence (/taxonomy/term/38)
Categories
Articles (/news/articles) (30)
The project (/taxonomy/term/30) (15)
Events (/news/events) (13)
Social capital (/taxonomy/term/32) (9)
Learning and development (/taxonomy/term/35) (8)
Press releases (/news/press-releases) (8)
Ethics and privacy (/taxonomy/term/33) (8)
Game-based assessment (/taxonomy/term/34) (7)
Career development (/taxonomy/term/31) (7)
Competency management (/taxonomy/term/37) (7)

Archive

May 2018 (/news/archive/201805) (1)

March 2018 (/news/archive/201803) (1)
February 2018 (/news/archive/201802) (1)
December 2017 (/news/archive/201712) (2)
November 2017 (/news/archive/201711) (1)
October 2017 (/news/archive/201710) (1)
September 2017 (/news/archive/201709) (2)
August 2017 (/news/archive/201708) (1)
July 2017 (/news/archive/201707) (4)
June 2017 (/news/archive/201706) (2)

Subscribe to our newsletter to get brand new information about DEVELOP!

newsletter
(/newsletter)

Follow us on the social media platforms and channels:

http://develop-project.eu/news/recommending-career-plans-through-AI-planning 3/4
5/20/2018 Recommending Career Plans Through AI Planning | Develop


 (https://www.facebook.com/develop.project.eu/)

 (https://twitter.com/Develop_eu)


 (https://www.linkedin.com/company/18094412/)


 (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAYqZjv-A78ytBpS46OdRhg)


 (https://www.xing.com/communities/groups/develop-project-6104-1087066)


 (http://www.slideshare.net/DevelopProject)

newsletter (/newsletter)

downloads (/downloads)

legal notice (/legal)

faq (/faq)

© develop (/node) — Developing Careers through Social Networks and Transversal Competencies.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
under grant agreement No. 688127.

http://develop-project.eu/news/recommending-career-plans-through-AI-planning 4/4