Objective: Soft skills

Use the soft skills objective to assign jobs to resources based on their soft skills.

Overview

Soft skills encompass the skill tags assigned to specific jobs or tasks, indicating the required skills that resources need to possess in order to undertake those jobs. These skills can be categorized with priorities such as low, medium, or high, indicating their relative importance or proficiency level.

For example, a job may require a resource with a driver’s license as a high priority soft skill, and the ability to speak a specific language as a medium priority soft skill. This means that the resource assigned to the job must have a driver’s license, and ideally, should also be able to speak the specified language.

Note

Skill tags with a skill priority of Required will be treated as a hard constraint. This means that the optimizer will not violate this constraint and will not assign the job to a resource that lacks the required skill. If no resource with the required skill can be found, the job will not be allocated to any resource.

Assigning weight to the soft skills objective

By assigning a weight, you are indicating the significance of considering soft skills as an objective in the scheduling process. The optimizer will prioritize assigning resources with the relevant skills based on the assigned weight.

It will strive to allocate resources with higher proficiency levels or priorities to jobs requiring those skills, while still considering other scheduling objectives.

Assigning no weight to the soft skills objective

When no weight is assigned to soft skills, the optimizer has the flexibility to optimize scheduling outcomes without specific constraints related to prioritizing or considering soft skills. It may focus on other objectives, without being bound by the requirement to prioritize soft skills explicitly.

This allows for more flexibility in achieving overall optimization, potentially resulting in the allocation of resources regardless of their proficiency levels in specific soft skills.

Use case: IT project management

Objective weighting:

Soft skills: 50%
Work priority: 30%
Minimize travel time: 20%

In IT project management, soft skills are crucial for effective collaboration and technical expertise. Work priority is significant to address critical issues or prioritize high-impact tasks. Minimizing travel time holds weight in scenarios where on-site visits or coordination with remote teams is required.

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