Modelling workforce employability pipelines for organisational resilience

Abstract

Large organisations use both internal and external methods to educate their workforce. Workforce approaches in Defence were usually of a closed nature, characterised by entry at recruitment and sequential and hierarchical rank progression. More recently, emerging technology and the associated pace of societal change has required Defence to recruit more laterally and to outsource more education, both ab initio and development. The growing complexity of workforce problems, therefore, challenges military educational decision making to increase its focus on organisational resilience. Modelling and Simulation (M&S) can take messy, ill-defined problems and build models for decision support and problem-solving. M&S is being explored in Defence workforce employability planning to deliver education that is more resilient to perturbations and can more confidently predict graduate demand for educational support partnering. However, the effective use of M&S can be compromised if it is not cognitively useful for the problem owner. A new transformational approach between the modeller and the managers of Defence educational workforce is proposed and illustrated by two conceptual case studies. The method uses the module-based translation between Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) design patterns and systems dynamics building blocks to reduce the problem owner’s reliance on specialist modellers. This approach increases the cognitive effectiveness of proposed workforce education solutions and the sharing and reuse of workforce M&S applications. Any large organisation with sufficient human resource and systems engineering support could adopt this new approach to model and simulate their workforce education and examine their resilience to fluctuations.