The lack of standardization of competency records hampers enterprise integration efforts, preventing organizations from linking their personnel databases to their training and assessment efforts. This lack of standardization leads to a greater risk level to their personnel and to the decisions these personnel must make at all levels. This also negates any immediate assessment of skilled personnel selection from high risk tasks to high risk decision making. This application effects many civilian organizations but is particularly applicable to many of the common Joint Environments DOD faces today. Automation of this linkage and creation of this process can reduce corporate costs and automatically provide the personnel databases with the assessment records and improve the documentation of personnel skills. Furthermore, an audit trail linking the assessment records of its employees to competencies desired by the enterprise is a valuable form of corporate knowledge and also valuable information for proving the fairness of promotions and salary increases. Training systems can increase their value to their sponsoring organization by supporting this linkage. Training systems can also employ this information to customize the learning for the individual based on gap analysis of the available evidence as compared with the desired evidence of the individual's competency.

The IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee is developing a standard for reusable competency definitions to enable effective exchange of worker competency information. This standard is based on an existing IMS specification for which there is existing practice. The standard is designed to achieve reuse by combining reusable component competency definitions and referencing existing catalogs of job descriptions, skills, knowledge, assessments, etc.

This paper presents a scenario that shows how to characterize competencies in terms of the U.S. Army's existing catalog of Military Occupational Specialties (MOS), critical tasks, and performance measures. The paper also describes how the assessment capabilities of SCORM 2004 can define policy in terms of alternative means of demonstrating competency and how a SCORM-compliant simulation can supply records needed to support a claim of competency. The scenario describes how two soldiers and their supervisor interact with a system using the standard to select assessment methods and tailor training for the soldiers.