Development of a method for the simulation-based cost and benefit analysis of further education.

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Berend Denkena; Professorin Dr. Julia Gillen
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290109050

Due to the transition from an industrial to a service society, fundamental change in work take place. This includes an increased importance of knowledge and knowledge acquisition. In conjunction with demographic change, this leads to a massive increase in the shortage of skilled labor. Companies cannot fill their vacant jobs with enough qualified applicants. In particular, SME are also confronted with the problem that international corporations poach highly qualified employees to fix their own personnel shortages. Increased use of further education is necessary in order to gain knowledge and retain process capability despite existing employee fluctuation. However, many industrial companies do not invest into further education, because the known education costs for employee is facing a not ratable benefit.Therefore, the aim of the proposed project "SAPA" is the implementation of a holistic cost-benefit analysis of further education. It includes methods for the optimized implementation of further training and for their quantitative analysis based on the process-specific performance of employees. In order to develop innovative approaches to this problem, an interdisciplinary cooperation of the Institute of Production Engineering and Machine Tools (IFW) and the Institute for Vocational and Adult Education (ifbe) is intended. It is complemented by the project-related cooperation with companies of different sectors and disciplines. The combination of engineer and educational scientific approaches allows the definition and the development of new work process-related models to describe the effects of an employee to the company's success, the individual knowledge, abilities and skills (competence) and the shown action of an employee within the company (performance). A simulation-based evaluation tool will be realized that quantifies further training-required changes in individual performance and impact on the corporate success. By comparing different training strategies, which differ in time, extent and content, the optimized strategy can be determined for each company. This project contributes to the development of suitable concepts to reduce the shortage of skilled labor.The result of the project "SAPA" involves in a concept for the optimization of further education with regard to the skills development of participants.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants