Development of Ontology Based Competence Management Model for Non-Formal Education Services

Abstract Competence management is a discipline that recently has regained popularity due to the growing demand for constantly higher competences of employees as well as graduates. One of the main implementation challenges of competence management is that, as a rule, it is based on experts’ implicit knowledge. This is the reason why the transformation of implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge practically is unmanageable and, as a consequence, limits the ability to transfer the already existing knowledge from one organisation to another. The paper proposes an ontology-based competence model that allows the reuse of existing competence frameworks in the field of non-formal education where different competence frameworks need to be used together for the purpose of identification, assessment and development of customers’ competences without forcing the organisations to change their routine competence management processes. The proposed competence model is used as a basis for development of competence management model on which IT tools that support a competence management processes may be built up. Several existing frameworks have been analysed and the terminology used in them has been combined in a single model. The usage of the proposed model is discussed and the possible IT tools to support the competence management process are identified in the paper.