Doreen Liebenow, Charlotte Haase, Charlotte von Bernstorff & Jens Nachtwei

Driven by staff shortage competence management becomes an important part of Human Resources. Furthermore, the need for a permanent professional entrenchment will become even more pressing. It is now more than ever necessary for companies to define competence profiles, which are aligned to the company’s strategy. In addition professional tools have to be used to identify, generate and evaluate relevant competences. Unfortunately, there is often a lack of support for the HR manager, for example with regard to the mechanism of combining scientific knowledge and practical requirements. Consequently, competence models are often just listings of abilities, skills and traits. Thus, companies are at risk of getting lost in the jungle of competence issues. This article is supposed to demonstrate the construction and evaluation of a science-based competence model and gives first practical suggestions for its development. The first version of the competence model was examined through a Card-Sorting-Survey. The presented study demonstrates the successful first step of developing a science-based competence model. All participants allocated the great majority of the constituent parts of the definitions in accordance to the model. In addition, all eleven competences of the model were considered transparent and mostly independent from their content. With the construction of the science-based competence model the question arose: How could the model be used in practice? Based on scientific knowledge and its use in practice criteria for sound competence models and their application are deduced.