Why we need dynamic terminological resources

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.
This article is divided into two parts. In the first part, we intend to present the PoCeHRMOM project, funded by the Flemish government in the framework of IWT-TETRA. The main purpose of this project is to develop a trilingual (English, French, Dutch) terminological knowledge repository of competency-based occupation profiles. Starting from this repository, companies will be able to set up lists of competencies (i.e. sets of skills, knowledge and behaviour) that they associate with given tasks or jobs in their organisations.
The study of terms denoting jobs or competencies brings us to the second part of this article. In many cases, several terms can denote exactly the same or almost the same category (e.g. system developer vs. software developer vs. application developer). In the second part of this article, we intend to discuss how terminological variation is dealt with in Termontography, a terminological approach in which theory and practices of sociocognitive terminology description (Temmerman 2000) are combined with methods in application-oriented, text-based ontology development (Zhao 2004). In particular, we will demonstrate with examples from the PoCeHRMOM project, how the MCFE application can account for several types of terminological variation (cf. Bowker and Hawkinson 2006; Daille et al. 1996; Dubuc 1997). The MCFE is a tool developed by CVC Brussels to set up multilingual categorisation frameworks (Kerremans 2004).