Purpose – The knowledge and competencies of the individual employees are valuable asset for a knowledge-intensive organization. A continuous education and training system enables an organization to build new knowledge and competencies among its members. To have an efficient and effective education and training plan that not only meet the need of individual employees but also improve organizational competencies is an important task for human resource management. Data mining has been used to discover the hidden patterns of data from a large-scale data warehouse. After further analyses, these data patterns may be transformed into intelligent knowledge as to support various decision makings. By using data mining, this study is aimed to explore the competency gap of the individual employees, and build the training needs predicting models. These models can assist human resource department to have an education and training plan that reduce the competency gap of the individual employees and also raise organizational knowledge asset and competencies as a whole.
Design / Methodology / Approach – The total amount of 638 example collected from Taiwan municipalities government 360-degree competency appraisal were used. These data were analyzed by SPSS to obtain statistic results. Data mining was used to explore the relationship among these data. Based on these results, the training needs predicting models were constructed.
Originality / Value – The results show that (1) the 360-degree competency appraisal model can be used to find out the competency gap and competency status. (2) the results of SPSS and data mining can be used to construct the training needs predicting models with accuracy above 70%. (3) the staff education and training plan can be obtained based on the training needs predicting models.
Practical Implications – The paper provided the reference of using data mining on the knowledge and competency management. The results could also provide the reference for planning the staff education and training plan, in order to achieve the purpose of improving individual and organizational knowledge and competencies.
Keywords: data mining, knowledge and competency management, 360-degree competency appraisal, staff education and training plan