The Personal Competence Management (PCM) is an integrative web-based portal environment which provides a very flexible and extendable solutions catalogue to support networks of individuals, teams and organisations in their lifelong competence development. This is possible at all levels of participation - individual learners, teams, and organisations –, at all levels of learning - secondary and tertiary education, including adult, company training, informal learning -, and at all levels of control of the learning goals and process (learner controlled, teacher/trainer/peer controlled, system controlled and mixed).

The TENCompetence Foundation co-ordinates the continuous and community-driven evolution of the PCM infrastructure. This comprises of a portal environment that integrates a wide range of community functionality like setting up and managing communities, discussion fora, blogging, identity management, ‘my space’ etc. with specific competence management portlets developed by TENCompetence. In addition a number of web-based tools provide functionality that may also be used separately from the integrative portal environment. 

The PCM integrates concepts from the fields of e-learning, human resource management and knowledge management, and these three areas constitute the principal domains where the system can be applied. To see examples of how the PCM can be used in practice, please look at the indicative business models which we have prepared for e-learning, HRM, and knowledge management. We hope that these will provide a starting point to inspire you to create your own innovative applications.

All software is published as Open Source under the  3-clause BSD open source license1. The source code for all software is available on Sourceforge. This comprises:

• Server software: The LifeRay portal server is distributed together with the TENCompetence Services server which provides services consumed by the TENCompetence portlets.  A suite of Learning Design runtime services can also be installed if the Learning Design portlets are to be used. This includes the CopperCore LD Engine, the Astro Learning Design player, the NewAPIS QTI engine, and the Wookie widget server. The Learning Design runtime services can also be used independently of the PCM. If you would like to install the TENCompetence server software, please consult the Installation Manual and the Implementation Guidelines.
• TENCompetence Liferay portlets: Users of the TENCompetence portal have available a suite of custom portlets for lifelong competence development (see Liferay Portlets tab).
• Standalone software: Two web tools are provided, which can be used with Liferay: TenTube and LearnWeb 2.0. A desktop editor for IMS Learning Design, ReCourse, has been developed (see Standalone Software tab).

This following video shows several portlets being used in the Personal Competence Manager: The Learning Path Editor provides an editor for creating and maintaining learning paths compliant to the TENCompetence Learning Path specification. The learning paths are used as input to create plans in the personal competence planner. The Goal Selector lets a user choose a goal the user wants to achieve. The selected goal will be input for the Activity Navigator and Assessment portlets. A user can toggle between goals. The assessment portlet helps a user to perform a self assessment for the competences required to achieve the selected goal. After performing this self assessment a competence gap can be determined. The Activity Navigator is the portlet that supports a user in actually achieving the selected goal, it thus forms an important part in personal development planning. It consists of two major functionalities. The first is targeted at determining a suitable learning plan for the user based on the available learning paths and the identified competence gaps. The second is targeted at following the learning plan by directing the user to the appropriate learning opportunities.