Leveraging Semantics to Provide Targeted Training Content: A Case Study

Employee training content (whether self-paced slide decks, interactive learning, or instructor-led sessions) is not just for employee onboarding, but is also important for existing employees to gain new skills, refreshers in past skills, and learn new technologies or procedures. It can be confusing to employees to know what training is appropriate. Tagging training courses for their topics is a good start, but that supports searching for something specific. If employees need to discover relevant training content that they don’t know about, courses should also be retrieved or recommended based on other criteria, such as the employee’s job role, level, and organizational unit.

A case study is described, whereby these methods and the PoolParty platform were used in a proof-of-concept project for Google gTech which successfully demonstrated how search and discovery of training content could be improved.

Heather Hedden explains ways taxonomies and semantics can improve search and discovery for training content, including improving a faceted taxonomy to make it more user-focused; semantically enriching a taxonomy with ontology-based relationships linking across roles, position levels, and skills; making topics relevant to different organizational groups; and auto-tagging training assets that lacked existing metadata.