An Ontological Approach to Competency Management

Competency management is a very important part of a well-functioning organisation especially when considering individual long-term development planning and organisational learning. Unfortunately competency descriptions are not uniformly specified nor defined across boarders: National, sectorial or organisational, leading to an opaque competency description market with a multitude of competency frameworks and competency benchmarks. The aim of the Leonardo sponsored project TRACE (TRAnsparent Competence in Europe) is to enable transparency between European competency frameworks that will include the use of an individualised common description language. This description will be based on a ontological competency description which will add semantic value to any description which has references to or bindings with it. An ontology in computer science is a formalised description of a domain. It is usually described in a description logics language where the individuals of a domain together with all the classes and their attribute and interrelations between individuals, classes and attributes are defined. This allows automated reasoning engines to be built which by utilising the interrelations between entities can make “intelligent” choices in different situations within the domain. Therefore with formalised competency ontologies automated tools could be developed, which compare and contrast different competency descriptions on the semantic level. Tools such as skill gap analysis, training suggestion generation, job search and recruitment could be envisaged all based on individual semantically specified competency descriptions, hence empowered to align the results with the actual meaning of the competencies, which would provide better results for the users. The major problem with defining a common ontology for competencies is that there are so many viewpoints of competencies and competency frameworks. Initial work within the TRACE project has focused on finding common trends within different competency frameworks in order to allow an intermediate competency description to be made, which other frameworks can make references to. Initially this research has shown that competencies usually can be divided up into “knowledge”, “skills” and what we call “others”. In the European Qualification Framework (EQF) for instance that would be called “Wider Competency”, in the American Occupational Information Network (O*NET) it is called “Abilities” and “Others”. An initial ontology has been created based on this with a simple structure of different “kinds” of “knowledges” and “skills” using semantic interrelations to define the basic semantic structure of the ontology. A prototype tool for analysing a skill gap analysis has been developed.. The tool is based on the initial ontology from the TRACE project together with a domain specific ontology defining particular competencies needed in the eLearning domain. Several personal profiles are produced and a skill gap analysis is performed on a desired competency profile by using an ontologically based inference engine, which is able to list closest fit and possible proficiency gaps. This shows how an ontological approach can enrich competency tools by utilising the semantic knowledge held in the competency descriptions; moreover it will highlight how this approach can provide a feasible technique for cross domain, sector and framework competency tools enabling transparency.