[uf-new] hResume missing qualifications and grades

[Glenn Jones]

Thanks Chuck: a couple of interesting points came from reading your
reply

Your point about the UK having a "relatively well-known, widely
referenced national system of course accreditation for pre-university
study" is well taken. University study is much more uniform, with a
considerable number of countries offering Bachelor, Masters and
Doctorate degrees. 

That said I think we need to stand back from these issues and ask what
is requried from a microformat perspective. The fundamental concept of
microformats has been to capture semantic structures in text and make
them available for machine processing.  That could be searching,
sorting, republishing or reformatting, in fact anything someone else may
want to use it for. 

We do not always need precision; a value can be anything from free text
to a quantifiable number in a fixed scale and still be useful.    

I tried to pick a structure that could isolate and preserve as much of
the semantic structure as possible, so that if it was reformatted we
would still be able to reproduce a good understanding of the educational
history.

i.e.  I could reconstruct a summary like this from a parsed hResume:
Between "dtstart" and "dtend", "fn" study at "institution" obtaining a
"grade" in "name" - "subject".

Reformatting the structure of information would seem to be the lowest
level of reuse I can think of. 

You are right, qualification name, subject and grade are too difficult
to directly compare. You would have to have a massive ontology like
those built into CV/resume parsers for machine based searching and
sorting to work well. But we could provide a much richer structure with
just a few changes, which would hopefully add a great deal more utility
to the format. 

Thanks again for the pointers to the resources and your thoughts. 

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_process
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_degree

Glenn



Chuck Allen wrote

> A couple reactions:

> 1. Based on some recent discussion/research in our community, I think
the UK market presents some fairly unique requirements > since it is one
of the 
> few countries with a relatively well-known, widely referenced national
system of course accreditation for pre-university study. > The wrinkle
our 
> "resume parsing" service providers find in UK resumes/CVs (and what
you reference in your example) is the need to capture > course
accreditation level 
> as well as grade. Here's a snippet example:

>> 1992-1994 SchoolName, UK
>> A Level: Mathematics (B), Physics (C), Economics (C)
>> AS Level: Electronics (A)
>> GCSE: Nine at grade C or above, including English, Mathematics &
French.

> The HR-XML work group recently discussed a new component to handle
representations like this within resumes. However, for right > now, our
rough 
> consensus is to leave this as a localization for the UK market. Below
is the draft model that we sketched out, but have not yet > moved
forward:
> AccreditedCourseWork
> -- CourseLevelCode (e.g., "AS," "A-Level," etc.)
> -- CourseCount
> -- TimePeriod
> -- EducationScoreDetails (reduced to Score/Mark)
> -- EducationOrganization
> -- Subject
> -- A Country Code or AcceditationSchemeID?

> 2. As with everything the microformat community considers (or HR-XML
for that matter) there's a slippery slope here in terms of complexity.
It seems 
> what makes a good microformat is something simple and relatively flat
versus hierarchical. HR-XML focuses a bit more on the back-office 
> system-to-system communication of data, so we have a bit more leeway.
However, on the particular topic of representing education, we certainly
realize 
> that we do not wish to be anything like a full "transcript" standard.
However, I think there is a lot of value to some simple standardization
of very 
> basic concepts. "Grade" is an interesting one. There are easily a
dozen consortia and standards organizations producing relevant 
> standards/specifications and I don't think you'll find much
consistency in terminology nor corresponding data type (grade, mark,
score, score format, 
> etc.)

> Being designed for humans first and computers second, the Microformats
community isn't as concerned with data types and data validation as
HR-XML. 
> However, HR-XML is currently trying to advance a few ideas to better
ensure interoperability with learning and education communities. We're
using the 
> term "Score" to refer to the numeric variety of "grades". Here's a
draft proposal we've submitted to the UN/CEFACT core data type
workgroup:
>
http://docs.hr-xml.org/resources/CandidatePaper_NewCDT_Score_0p2-1-DRAFT
.pdf
> I not yet sure about the name for the textual or symbolic variety of
"grade". Perhaps, we'll just call this "Grade" or "Mark" or
"ScoreFormat". Still 
> having that "what's in a name" debate on this.

> I hope this information proves useful. I'd welcome feedback online or
offline regarding any of the above.

> Chuck Allen

> -------------------------
> HR-XML notes:
>> Discussed patterns in the UK relating to information about
>> accredited course work often found in CV's. This is usually
>> a course of secondary (ISCED 3) or pre-university study
>  >
>> Questions:
>> -- Is this a UK localization? At the very least
>> it is safe to say that few other countries have
>> a system of secondary study accreditation and
>> credit transfer that is as consistent and widely
>> implemented as the NQF in the UK. See:
>> http://tinyurl.com/5sswg7
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Qualifications_Framework
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCSE
>  >
>> -- Might some of this be mapped to competency
>> records and evidence? Yes. Yet at least in UK resumes
>> this type of accredited secondary course work is
>> commonly broken out in resumes and CVs. If you look
>> at the IMAP model for capturing NQF data, it does seem
>> like it was intended as a broader mechanism for
>> describing competencies than something designed around
>> this course-work communication issue.