Operationalising ontologies for competence management in the industry

With the increasing availability of digital resources for on-the-job training, competence management in the industry requires new tools to identify training opportunities for the continuous development of the skills of employees. Our emphasis is to determine which digital courses or further learning resources suit the actual employee’s competence in combination with the skills and knowledge she or he aspires to achieve. In this paper, we describe the role of ontologies and, in particular, the ESCO ontology for the development of suitable profiles for learners, learning goals, and learning resources. We describe the matching processes operating on these profiles in order to identify the training opportunities that match best the learner’s capacity and aspirations.