Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 13, numbers 3 and 4, 2020 // View article

Leveraging Blockchain, Analytics and Decision Support to Facilitate Qualifications’ Verification, Recruitment and Competency Management: The QualiChain Project and Initial Results

Authors:
Christos Kontzinos
Ourania Markaki
Panagiotis Kokkinakos
Vagelis Karakolis
Panagiotis Kapsalis
John Psarras

Keywords: qualification verification; recruitment; competency management; blockchain; analytics; decision support.

Abstract:
In today’s society, digitisation is becoming the new norm for various facets and processes of everyday life, taking advantage of advancements in Information and Communication Technologies and other innovative and emerging technologies. The same cannot be said for higher education and the labour market that still operate with traditional techniques when it comes to the certification, issuance and verification of academic qualifications as well as recruitment and competency management respectively. Lack of technical competencies by supporting staff and security issues regarding personal data are strong disincentives when it comes to reengineering current processes. Under that context, this publication presents QualiChain, an European Union-funded project that aims to revolutionise the domain of public education, as well as its interfaces with the labour market, policy making and public sector administrative procedures by disrupting the way accredited educational titles and other qualifications are archived, managed, shared and verified. QualiChain’s technical solution leverages blockchain to improve overall security and data sovereignty and the computational intelligence found in analytics and decision support to develop value-adding components on top of a robust blockchain infrastructure. This publication presents the project concept as well as current progress and initial results relevant to the theoretical background of QualiChain, the development of the QualiChain platform and the scenarios that have been developed to validate the solution in specific pilot contexts. In fact, the first version of the platform proves that blockchain, semantics, and analytics can indeed disrupt higher education and the labour market and lead to substantial efficiency, productivity, and transparency impacts.

Pages: 177 to 191

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2020. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2020

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679