What's Next? A Recommendation System for Industrial Training

Continuous training is crucial for creating and maintaining the right skill-profile for the industrial organization's workforce. There is a tremendous variety in the available trainings within an organization: technical, project management, quality, leadership, domain-specific, soft-skills etc. Hence it is important to assist the employee in choosing the best trainings, which perfectly suits her background, project needs and career goals. In this paper, we focus on algorithms for training recommendation in an industrial setting. We formalize the problem of next training recommendation, taking into account the employee's training and work history. We present several new unsupervised sequence mining algorithms to mine the past trainings data from the organization for arriving at personalized next training recommendation. Using the real-life data about trainings of 118587 employees over 5019 distinct trainings from a large multi-national IT organization, we show that these algorithms outperform several standard recommendation engine algorithms as well as those based on standard sequence mining algorithms.