Modern Human Resource Management (HRM) for knowledge-based enterprises must consider competencies of the workforce on a more detailed level of description than in the past. With this more complex description and the requirement to exchange information between different organizations in networked enterprises it becomes necessary to standardize the description of competencies and other related concepts. We have developed an ontology containing concepts of HRM for two different projects: a meta-search engine for searching for jobs in job portals and for a university competence management system. We present the requirements derived from the two projects and describe the design of the ontology. This ontology is characterized by its integration of job descriptions, concepts for evaluating competencies on different levels and evidences for competencies. The definition is also aligned with the HR-XML approach of defining competence profiles.

Nowadays enterprises require more knowledge than ever. Thus the role of Human Resource Management has changed and competence management became necessary as an important supporting management process. Competence management at universities is an essential core process that delivers value to the customer (student) directly. It can be a first step to make students aware of required competencies. This work describes the design of an ontology based competence management system. Personal competency profiles can be stored and goal profiles can be used to perform a gap analysis. New measurement approaches can be integrated and the system provides an interface for data exchanging. This paper closes with the results of the evaluation of the prototype.