Streamlining Faculty CVs: Elevating Faculty Experience
Creating Curriculum Vitaes (CVs) is a vital yet often time-intensive task for academics and medical professionals, especially in large faculties like the UBC Faculty of Medicine. Faculty members frequently face challenges in gathering, standardizing, and formatting data to meet the varied requirements of institutional and academic processes. This process can be further complicated by the lack of streamlined systems to manage information across units.
To address these challenges, the Faculty of Medicine Digital Solutions team, in collaboration with the UBC CIC, developed a prototype that simplifies CV creation.
Approach
By bringing data together, standardizing it and providing a user-friendly interface for faculty to consolidate their CV information, this solution enables CVs to be produced efficiently, making them more easily available for upstream processes, such as activity reporting, merit and recognition submissions, and Academic CV requirements. Consolidating data into a standardized format and providing a unified tool accessible across units means the prototype enables consistency while significantly reducing administrative effort.
The platform also provides features that cater to different needs, supporting role-specific functionality. Faculty can easily generate CVs or other standardized reports for specific use cases and administrators are provided oversight capabilities, enabling them to assist with updates, manage processes across departments, and easily produce department-wide scholarly reporting, ensuring consistency and adherence to institutional standards.
Additionally, the data can be repurposed for other institutional reporting needs, enhancing its value beyond CV creation. This streamlined approach allows faculty members to dedicate more time to their core responsibilities, such as research and clinical work, fostering greater productivity and effectiveness across the Faculty of Medicine.
This approach not only improves the efficiency for faculty by reducing administrative workloads but also enhances collaboration by enabling faculty to elicit support from assistants and administrators when needed. Ultimately, the prototype delivers a scalable solution that standardizes the CV creation process while respecting the unique requirements of different users.
Impacts
To address the challenges of the CV creation process, the prototype simplifies and enhances the experience for faculty by automating data curation and tailoring the interface to their specific needs. For faculty, the solution reduces the administrative burden by consolidating data from various sources, such as teaching records, research awards, and publications, and presenting it in a format aligned with institutional CV requirements. This allows faculty to allocate more time to their clinical, teaching, and research activities rather than the time-consuming task of manually compiling and formatting their CVs.
Supporting Artifacts
Architecture Diagram
Technical Details
You can deploy the solution by following the Deployment Guide available on the UBC CIC GitHub Repo. The prototype is fully deployable as infrastructure as code.
Front End Flow
Users access the application via their web browser, where AWS Cognito manages authentication to secure access to AWS resources. All queries go through AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) to protect against malicious activities, such as DDoS attacks. Once approved, these queries are forwarded to AWS AppSync for processing.
User Data Retrieval
AWS AppSync triggers a Lambda resolver to store, update, or fetch the necessary data, connecting to the PostgreSQL database. It also retrieves profiles and publications from external sources, allowing users to select which items to add. Once confirmed, the chosen data is stored in the PostgreSQL database.
CV Generation
GraphQL resolvers log updates to CV data in a DynamoDB table, recording the last update timestamp for each user and CV template. The React application checks this timestamp against the CV stored in an S3 bucket. If the CV is current, a pre-signed URL is generated for download; otherwise, a new LaTeX file is created and uploaded. Uploading the .tex file triggers a Lambda function that converts it into a PDF, which is then stored in the S3 bucket.
Bulk Data Pipeline
Users upload various CSV files to a bulk data S3 bucket, which triggers a Lambda function to process the data. This function stores the information from the CSV files in the RDS database.
Patent Data Pipeline
Raw patent data is fetched from an API, covering publications from 2001 to the present for Canada and the U.S., and stored as CSV files in an S3 bucket. Glue jobs clean this data, standardizing formats and separating names into first and last names before inserting the cleaned data into the RDS database.
Grant Data Pipeline
When grant data files are uploaded to the S3 bucket, an event notification triggers a Lambda function to process the files. The function runs different glue jobs to clean grant data and store the finalized data in the grants table of the PostgreSQL database. This structured workflow ensures an efficient and secure process for generating CVs and managing associated data.
Link to solution on GitHub: https://github.com/UBC-CIC/FacultyCV
Screenshots of UI
Faculty Role
Users creating their CV can search categories of academic activities to update their CV. The search bar allows them to quickly find specific entries, while filter buttons enable them to add or remove sections to customize the CV they are creating.
Faculty members, or their delegates, can select from administrator-maintained templates to generate a corresponding PDF. The system previews the PDF on-screen, and users can download it to their local computer by clicking the download button.
Faculty members can configure essential information, such as first and last name, Scopus ID, and ORCID ID, to enable automatic data fetching. All changes made to the profile can be manually saved by clicking the save button to ensure updates are retained.
Assistant Role
Faculty members can also assign assistants to help complete CV requirements.
A delegate or department administrator can request to be assigned to a faculty member’s CV. The solution facilitates sending an invitation to the faculty member, allowing the assistant to create and manage CVs on their behalf.
Once a connection is accepted, assistants gain access to the faculty member’s profile and can manage their profile.
Admin Role
Central Admins can view all users and Department Admins can view all users within their department. They can manage the user’s connections and vary the access of the user by changing their roles.
Admins have access to a dashboard that integrates data from multiple sources to provide key metrics such as number of users, number of CVs generated, total grant money raised, etc. By linking CV data with outcomes like grant funding, the tool offers insights into the impact of faculty activities and supports data-driven decisions. This functionality not only streamlines CV management but also provides a more comprehensive view of individual and departmental achievements.
Department admins can view the metrics for their specific department. This focused view allows them to make data-driven decisions that directly impact their area of responsibility. In addition, they are able to visualise trends for yearly grant and publication data based on CV data. Analytics functionality empowers department admins to track progress and make strategic decisions that drive departmental success.
Admins have the ability to edit an existing CV section or create a new one, ensuring that the document remains accurate and tailored to evolving needs.
Admins can also edit existing CV templates or create new ones, allowing for customization that aligns with specific institutional needs.
Visuals
Infographic
Video
Acknowledgements
Project Sponsors: Gurm Dhugga, Kenny Hammond, and Shelly Au.
Student team: Development by Abhi Verma, Aayush Behl, Alethea Kramer, and Khushi Narang. Project assistance by Victoria Li and Amy Cao.
Photo by the Unsplash
About the University of British Columbia Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC)
The UBC CIC is a public-private collaboration between UBC and Amazon Web Services (AWS). A CIC identifies digital transformation challenges, the problems or opportunities that matter to the community, and provides subject matter expertise and CIC leadership.
Using Amazon’s innovation methodology, dedicated UBC and AWS CIC staff work with students, staff and faculty, as well as community, government or not-for-profit organizations to define challenges, to engage with subject matter experts, to identify a solution, and to build a Proof of Concept (PoC). Through co-op and work-integrated learning, students also have an opportunity to learn new skills which they will later be able to apply in the workforce.
