OR Student Seminar - A Multi-objective Model for Skill Development in a Multi-Skilled Workforce, Alice Robins (Southampton) Seminar

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Workforce planning is of strategic importance to most organisations. It is in particular challenging when tasks may require employees with specialised skills and various training activities may be proposed. In such environments, the value of dynamic skill development within a workforce cannot be ignored. We are in particular interested in increasing our understanding of how multiple skills and their development should be distributed among a pool of technicians, and how this may depend on the operational environment. This research develops a novel approach based on multi-objective linear programming for determining an optimal strategic plan of skill development of a multi-skilled workforce when there are multiple training regimes that may be selected and various constraints on the operations of the training. For instance, additional constraints are required for skill development given uncertainty in the future demand for each type of task. In this thesis we focus on the development of the model and its application in organisations through the development of a decision support tool. This tool provides training recommendation for employees under different training options. We discuss the sensitivity analysis of the optimal workforce strategy to various changes to demand, components of the tasks, and training strategies.