This article will discuss the experience of upgrading 

In a small team. knowlge sharing and immersion in the specifics of work processes occurs directly during joint activities. and if an adaptation plan is ne. it can be creat and maintain in regular tables and documents. But when a company grows and hires several people a day. it becomes much more difficult to control adaptation. conduct training for employees and partners. and. especially. implement ambitious HR projects. To help HR development and marketing specialists. companies began to implement learning management systems (LMS).

One of the popular LMS systems present on the Russian market is Knomary LMS. In 2023. it enter the TOP-10 of the TAdviser rating in terms of revenue from projects in the HRM sphere. The system has already been implement by such large companies as EVRAZ. Cherkizovo. RusHydro. UGMK.

Current state of the platform and the ne for changes

Knomary LMS is a typical representative of corporate ucational platforms with rich capabilities:

• Centraliz learning management. All learning materials and courses are stor in one place. making it easy to access and manage the learning process.
• Personalization of training. LMS  buy telemarketing data allows you to create individual training plans. taking into account the nes and level of training of each employee.
• Organization of distance learning. Employees can undergo training at a time convenient for them and from any place. which is especially important for those working in production;
• Manage user engagement and experience through regular surveys and timely feback;
• Monitoring and evaluation of results. Logging user actions. tracking progress with the ability to check knowlge and deep analytics of results.

EVRAZ’s personnel retention policy is aim. among other things. at identifying employees with abilities and talents in engineering and technical fields and possessing good industry expertise. And then at creating conditions for developing their management skills and career advancement. For this purpose. the company uses the L&D platform (Learning and Development) “EVRAZ Navigator”. built on the basis of LMS Knomary.

Layout of the portal’s main page.

The platform solv its problems. but over time. HR managers ne to automate competitive selections. Traditionally. applications for a competition are collect by filling out questionnaires on different platforms depending on the competition (SharePoint. email. LMS). Information is stor and updat in excel files. and applications are distribut by email. At the time of the request. there was no single database with participant data. participation history. and competitive selection results. nor was there a unifi system for selection and sending notifications. Much was done manually by the organizers. Competitions are  united states business directory held several times a year. each lasting several months. The results have a strong impact on people’s careers. so the responsibility and labor intensity of the process are quite high.

The objectives of the work on creating the competitive selection section were:

• Ruction of labor costs for HR specialists across the company. EVRAZ has already had positive experience with automation in the New Leaders of EVRAZ project: labor costs were ruc from 945 to 270 man-hours.
• Creation of a single database of candidates for internal recruitment (New Leaders of EVRAZ. Succession System. NTK. Young Manager Competition and other internal projects).
• Improving the convenience of system users (awareness of participants about the current status in the competitive selection. a single entry point. information about all competition participants in one place). etc.

Features of the ucational platform bas on Knomary LMS

Before starting work. we conduct an audit of the system. which show that it had a number of problems. without solving which the start of the project was in question. Knomary is a ready-made solution with its shortcomings. but there is no way to clearly determine whether the problem is part of its code or something acquir during the contractors’ modifications. From the code. we saw that many controversial decisions were made during the development of the platform’s functionality. primarily due to the fact that the product did not provide for the ability to add additional structures. They were add along the way. with crutches and flaws. so that the system would work.

Here are some of the features that made it difficult to refine:

• Outdat version of PHP and CodeIgniter — the framework underlying the LMS. The project is currently bas on CodeIgniter version 3. it supports PHP  what is spam for google? 7.4 at most. which creates security risks and complicates support. Switching to the same framework version 4 will require a complete refactoring and partial rewriting of the code. If you do not neglect security. you ne to upgrade to PHP 8.1. and this will require a change in the development approach.
  • html markup (<div>…</div>) in the controller code
    Not very high quality of the system code. For example:
    • ignoring standard php functionality. for example here it is solv via ucfirst
  •  
    • code using the ctrl+c & ctrl+v principle
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  • “magic” constants (375295064707) that say nothing
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  • unfinish code (the $users variable. into which data is stor and then not us)
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• confusion about controllers and their use;
• lack of abstractions. which makes it impossible to reuse ready-made blocks;
• queries directly in MySQL language;
• storing access rights in the code (we won’t show it for obvious reasons). etc.

The proposal to raise the language and framework versions was not support because:

• This is truly a huge task. tantamount to a complete resign of the platform;
• The platform itself is a significant. but not critical. part of the HR management system.

Therefore. the development of the new section had to be carri out on the old framework. But modern technologies were also add: REST was us for exchanges. the front was made on vuetify. and the contests section was implement as an SPA application. Such applications can dynamically load the necessary content from the server without updating the interface. They work quickly and load the server less. and the user gets the feeling that he performs all actions on one page.

Section design and competition scenario in LMS Knomary

 BPMN notations are now understandable not only to analysts. product managers and programmers. but also to ordinary business users.

Schemes: creating a competition and testing on an external platform

The system has a flexible role model: each role has its own access and set of actions in each type of competition. It can automatically distribute applications submitt to the competition depending on the participant’s relationship to a particular department. It also provides the ability to manually adjust the distribution of applications between departments. copy and save templates for individual stages of the competition and the competition as a whole.