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Abstract
Purpose - Aims to review the key concepts of competency management (CM) and to propose method for developing competency method.
Design/methodology/approach - Examines the CM features of 22 CM systems and 18 learning management systems.
Findings - Finds that the areas of open standard (XML, web services, RDF), semantic technologies (ontologies and the semantic web) and portals with self-service technologies are going to play a significant part in the evolution of CM systems.
Originality/value - Emphasizes the beneficial attributes of CM for private and public organizations.
Keywords Competences, Competences framework, Modelling, Information management
Paper type General review
1. Introduction
Competence management (CM) is an important research object in the more general area of knowledge management and a CM system is often integrated with learning management systems (LMSs). CM can have an important contribution at an organizational and personal level, as it identifies the key knowledge that an employee or an organization should possess in order to achieve his/its targets.
Competence and skills management have been tightly linked to the efforts of companies to create a setting for the empowerment of their workforce in order to increase competitive advantage, innovation, and effectiveness (Houtzagers, 1999). In addition, CM is directly related to corporate efforts to leverage internal knowledge and initiate consistent knowledge management initiatives (Hellstrom et al., 2000; Ley and Albert, 2003). Recently, CM is a research field attracting efforts to leverage personnel development (Beck, 2003), knowledge sharing (Won and Pipek, 2003), corporate e-learning efforts (Hockemeyer et al., 2003) as well as applications of semantic technologies like ontology management (Colucci et al., 2003).
Our objective in the present paper is to review the most common and widespread competency management (CM) systems, to study their characteristic applications and to provide future research directions.
The paper is organized as follows: in the first section, we provide a short introduction to CM. Next, we provide definitions of the key concepts of competency based management and analyse the competency lifecycle and the core application areas of CM systems. In the third section, we describe the different phases in developing a competency model, the cornerstone of a CM system. In the fourth section, we present our analysis on 22 CM systems and 18 LMSs which incorporate CM modules. We also...