European Commission
e-Skills Website
European ICT stakeholders cooperation on multiple levels
The European e-Competence Framework (e-CF) is a reference framework of ICT competences that can be used and understood by ICT user and supply companies, ICT practitioners, managers and HR departments, the public sector, educational and social partners across Europe.
The framework has been developed by a large number of European ICT and HR experts in the context of the CEN Workshop on ICT Skills. The workshop provides a discussion and working platform for both national and international representatives from the ICT industry, public and private vocational training organisations, social partners and other institutions. It aims to create long-term human resources (HR) and competence development solutions for the European Information and Communication Technology (ICT) community.
A joint effort by ICT industry, training, research and policy makers
In 2005, further to the recommendations of the European e-Skills Forum, the ICT Skills workshop members agreed that national ICT framework stakeholders as well as European ICT industry representatives - both human resources and ICT experts - should consider developing a European e-Competence Framework.
With the encouragement of the European Commission, ICT framework stakeholders, representatives from several European larger companies and an applied research foundation met for a kick-off early 2006 in order to put this intention into practice. During an intensive follow-up, they designed a programme for the work towards a European e-Competence Framework under the umbrella of the CEN workshop on ICT Skills.
These efforts were welcomed and recognised in the Communication of the European Commission on "e-Skills for the 21st Century: Fostering Competitiveness, Growth and Jobs" of September 2007 and the Competitiveness Council Conclusions of November 2007.
Stakeholders and experts cooperation towards the e-CF version 1.0
In order to achieve a European agreement and useful results at an international and national level, the Europe-wide involvement of further ICT sector players and stakeholders from business, politics and education has been crucial to the framework development philosophy and strategy.
Whilst at the political level it was important to get the larger multistakeholder public of the European ICT sector engaged; at the expert working level focus was placed upon HR and IT management know-how from the European ICT industry.
The European e-Competence Framework version 1.0 was published in 2008 from the outcome of two-years e-Skills multistakeholder, ICT and human resources experts' work from multiple organisation levels (CWA 15893-1 and CWA 15893-2).
European e-Competence Framework version 2.0 published in 2010
The European e-Competence Framework 2.0 and the user guidelines build upon the e-CF version 1.0, and take into account the first e-CF application experience and feedback from ICT stakeholders across Europe.
In addition to competence description updates across the entire framework, four new competences have been added. Furthermore, dimension 4 has been fully populated: samples of knowledge and skills relate to each e-Competence in dimension 2. These knowledge and skills samples are provided to add value and context and are not intended to be exhaustive.
However, care has been taken to ensure that existing users of version 1 are able to adopt version 2 without excessive effort. For instance no competences have been deleted and wording changes have been made to add clarity without changing the original meaning.
Detailed documentation about the changes made from e-CF version 1.0 to version 2.0 can be found in the e-CF 2.0 CWA Annex 1.
The European e-Competence Framework 2.0 is the outcome of the "e-CF in action" project which took place from 2009 to 2010 in the European ICT multistakeholder context of the CEN Workshop ICT Skills.
