[PDF]

automatic generation of Word documents for the Year in Industry programme


Worawat Kimpara

29/05/2020

Supervised by Martin Caminada; Moderated by Natasha Edwards

For its Year in Industry programme, the School of Computer Science and Informatics uses a document called the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). This is an industry standard that contains a wide variety of IT-related professional skills (such as "Software Development" or "Testing"). For each of these skills, different levels are identified, at which a professional can operate. In general, the higher levels indicate that a person is doing work of greater complexity, with more influence and at a higher level of autonomy. The university asks each of its placement students to select two IT professional skills from the SFIA document, and expects the student to reach level 3 (BSc students) or level 4 (MSc students) of at least one of these, by the end of their placement. To assess this, each student is provided with a form that contains his/her chosen two SFIA IT professional skills. Of each skill, the different levels are indicated. A similar form is provided to the student's workplace manager. Right now, these forms are created manually, which is taking more and more work, as the number of students doing a Year in Industry keeps growing. Hence, we are interested in a piece of software that can automatically create the relevant forms upon request. This software would take the SFIA abbreviations of the professional skills as input (say, "PROG" and "TEST") and would produce the relevant two Word forms (Student version and Employer version) as output. This is then done by parsing the SFIA document, which is in PDF (if parsing the PDF document turns out to be too difficult, it would also be possible to convert the document to plain text during and pre-process things). Ideally, the system should be web-based so that the students can simply generate the documents they need. It is important to notice that this project aims to produce software that will actually be applied by the university. This means the final product should be of a high quality (including aspects such as code quality and maintainability). Ideally, we would also like the system to make suggestions for possible SFIA IT professional skills based on a written description of the work that the student is doing on a day-to-day basis.


Initial Plan (03/02/2020) [Zip Archive]

Final Report (29/05/2020) [Zip Archive]

Publication Form