Mediated Competency Comparison between Job Descriptions and University Courses

In order to establish and maintain IT empowered cooperation between universities and industrial organizations; on the one hand universities should be informed about trends in the labour market, and on the other hand industrial organizations should have an insight into trends of knowledge development in universities. Furthermore, taking into consideration that a competency is becoming a kind of “currency” in the labour market, there is a need to compare competency demand from the industrial organizations and competency offer from the universities in order to see if the university can satisfy competency needs of industrial organizations. The use of competency frameworks and mappings between competency frameworks can facilitate information exchange about the competencies. The paper describes the method and the prototype for mediated competency comparison with respect to job descriptions and university courses. The prototype conforms to the architecture of collaboration support system and its services that have been designed with the purpose to maintain and exchange information between universities and industrial organizations.