The issue of people at work is pervasive. Besides the primary players: worker and employer on the scene, there are other stakeholders: employment agencies, training providers, professional associations and policy makers.

What job shall I do next What profession should I go into Who will carry out the project Who is the best candidate for the job How is the team performing How is staff better engaged at workplace

What is the skill gap What is the opportunity of career development How is training best adapted to learning needs How is the profession be accredited and regulated What are future trends of the profession or sector What is the workforce plan for the business strategies

The worker needs be effective at work for his intellectual, physical economic well-being. The employer needs productivity from work for business growth. The underlying issue is competences demanded by the employer and offered by the worker at work.

Competence - a working definition It is an ability demonstrated in an activity at work. It has multiple aspects, expressed in terms such as abilities, skills, expertise, knowledge, education, qualification, behaviour, aptitude, values, attitudes. Its denotation, classification and quantification are context-sensitive, stakeholder-dependent and appliction specific. Competency is a competence profile, a set of competences associated with a person, team, task, role, project, profession, service, process, practices, courses, publications and policy.

Communicating Competency Competences are expressed in formal, semi-formal and informal representations. They can be represented in a formal system, such as ontology, for knowledge reasoning in artificial intelligence. They can also be specified in restricted natural language in a specific information model, for example, competency frameworks. The former is to enable intelligent computation in computer systems; whereas the latter is intended as organizational, professional or sectorial guidelines or standards for consensus and communication in human resources management and development. Its informal representation, however, is more of 'vernacular' description than of 'professional' specification. It is intuitive and common in communicating about competences. But their denotation is often imprecise and ambiguous. Their interpretation depends on both explicit and implicit contexts of use. Examples are CV, job advertisements, performance evaluation and course descriptions.

Managing competency Communicating about competency is to

• faciliate the exercise of competences at work
• mediate competency supply and demand in the human resource management and development

These primary functions of Competency Management, facilitation and mediation, impact directly on business and economic performance and, in turn, on social context.