Abstract:Human skills and knowledge will be the main economic resources in a Knowledge Society. Therefore parties involved have a need to exchange information about quality and content of knowledge and skills resources. The development of a protocol for communication about skills and knowledge requires a strong international commitment, cooperation and effort on research and development, e.g. on text analysis, modelling, structuring and unified classification schemes for main domains of knowledge. As an example, ICT professionals from all over the world have identified the need for a generic description of ICT skills and knowledge. Because of the great variety in definitions, terminology and conceptual constructs, ambiguity and misunderstandings occur while trying to connect national and international educational and professional descriptions of ICT skills and knowledge. As far as we have observed, nobody has succeeded in defining such a global standard. However, it does not seem to be possible to develop one generic standard for ICT skills and knowledge either on a national scale, on the scale of an international region or on a global scale. This is based on the notion that every description of ICT skills and knowledge has its own professional, social and cultural background and stands in its own rights. A new approach is needed, such as the development and application of a referential framework and tools. A recent initiative is the development of GRIP (Generic Referential ICT Profiles), a method presented as a "common language" approach, to be used to characterise, compare and analyse existing ICT skills profiles. GRIP can be used for different purposes and with different levels of detail. This approach, originally meant for ICT profiles, seems to have a broad range of application in other domains.