Blockchain-Enabled Verifiable Credential Management for Workforce Competency Assurance

Blockchain technology in organizational Human Resource Management (HRM) has been discussed for its advantages, mainly in the efficient recording of job candidates' educational backgrounds and streamlined verification of their education, skills, expertise, and training. Scholars have proposed smart contracts, a technology with growing popularity, to optimize HRM processes in the blockchain-based HRM system. Nevertheless, smart contracts facilitate traceability, verifiability, and workforce competency credentialing, losing sight of the effectiveness in evaluating professional knowledge and the alignment between professional certifications and job roles. To address such critical misses, our study proposes BVCM-WCA (Blockchain-Enabled Verifiable Credential Management for Workforce Competency Assurance) to integrate internally defined job competency/certification and job-role matching rules for employee competency verification and assurance. Furthermore, for employees who do not meet the job competency requirements, the system can recommend either internal corporate training programs or external certification programs. Through BVCM-WCA, the HR personnel can flexibly and efficiently manage employee competencies and certifications to meet the increasingly diverse workforce skill requirements brought about by the growing variety of jobs. Our experimental results demonstrate that the designed smart contract effectively supports both job competency/certification verification and training hour compliance checks. Our proposed BVCM-WCA system can efficiently process verifications and present results within 300 ms, and has proved to be an effective tool for HR competency assurance