Announcing lsgraph, an open source project for workforce reskilling

Today, we are delighted to announce the lsgraph project, an open source API to support decisions around reskilling and upskilling. LearnerShape has been privately developing lsgraph as a core part of our infrastructure and are now publicly releasing our codebase under the LGPL license.

The LearnerShape platform software has two main parts. When using the public website, the pages you see are generated by an internal backend server named lsweb. This project handles the user interactions and contacts lsgraph for more data-intensive actions. We hope others will find lsgraph useful for their learning projects, just as we find it useful to support lsweb.

We plan to release lsweb at a later date, enabling a complete instance of the Learnershape platform to be hosted by people and organisations other than LearnerShape. The code we are releasing today supports programmatic access to:

• Managing courses
• Making course suggestions based on skill gaps
• Job recommendations
• Workforce planning

We are hoping that, in addition to allowing you to re-use and adapt the code for use in your own projects, having an open source project available will also stimulate discussion and research around reskilling. We have written in previous blog posts on reskilling issues, including about our approaches to skill maps and flexible reskilling. LearnerShape’s open source release has grown from those ideas and is continuing to develop.

If you are interested in this project, there are many ways to get involved; participating in discussions, reporting issues, suggesting features, even building new features together with our team. There is a detailed file to help you get started contributing to the project.

The project is hosted on github. The application can be quickly started using Docker and a set of jupyter notebooks have been created to demonstrate the functionality available.

We are eager to continue developing lsgraph and see how the project evolves with input from the community. Together, we can better address the challenges of workforce reskilling and the cross-industry disruption caused by technological changes.

Dr Jonathan Street
Head of Data Science, Learnershape