Towards a multilingual termontological resource of competency-based job descriptions for SMEs: the case of terminological variation

Competency management has taken a central position in the HRM policies of large companies. The urge to maintain an overview of the individual competencies (i.e. knowledge, skills and attitudes of employees) as well as core competencies (i.e. the things a company is experienced in) results amongst others from the need to react on market shifts. Moreover, competency management leads to better job planning, objective criteria for the evaluation of personnel, a higher interest in the learning opportunities within the company, a better insight in the structure of the organisation, etc. As a result, it could be argued that competencies are the main vocabulary of large companies to communicate e.g. expertise (knowledge and skills). The use of this vocabulary in combination with new emerging technologies leads to many innovative applications in the field of e-HRM. In this article, we discuss the problems that may arise when competency-based job profiles are automatically exchanged in a semantic web environment. Competencies may be denoted by different terms while similar terms may have different meanings. We will illustrate with examples from the PoCeHRMOM project how we attempt to overcome these problems of terminological variation by adopting our own terminology management practices and tools.