An OpenAssurance profile — people
Competency evidence that doesn't have to be entered twice.
Qualifications, licences, training, practical competency, experience, inductions and employer authorisations — held by the employer, presented to whoever needs them, verified without joining anyone's platform.
Define locally. Issue anywhere.
Share anywhere. Verify anywhere.
The worker already exists somewhere else
A contractor may already hold verified information about a worker — formal qualifications, licences, practical assessments, experience, inductions, internal authorisations.
A customer then requires that worker to be established inside another competency-management platform. So the contractor creates a second worker record, enters the same identifying information, uploads the same qualifications, reproduces the same competency records, and from then on maintains expiry dates in both systems.
The additional administration does not create additional evidence of competency. It creates another copy of the same evidence, and another thing that can fall out of date.
Can an employer provide valid competency evidence to a customer without both organisations being customers of the same competency platform?
The OpenCompetency test
What OpenCompetency covers
Competency is not represented by formal qualifications alone. The profile is intended to carry the full range of assurance information organisations actually rely on.
- Qualifications
- Licences
- Training
- Courses
- Assessments
- Practical competency
- Experience
- Inductions
- Employer authorisations
- Supervisor attestations
The original issuer stays visible
Different records come from different sources, and a record shared by an employer is still the qualification provider's record. Sharing a credential does not make you its issuer.
Workplace attestations matter
An employer, supervisor, assessor or business owner may legitimately attest that a worker has performed a task, accumulated experience, demonstrated practical ability, operated particular equipment, worked under supervision, or satisfied an internal authorisation process.
OpenCompetency should represent these clearly — who made the assertion, their organisation, what was asserted, the basis for it, when it applied, and any supporting evidence. The receiving organisation remains free to decide whether that is sufficient.
Requirements are set locally, not centrally
An organisation defines what it requires for a role. OpenCompetency provides a common way to express that requirement and test evidence against it — not a universal answer to who is competent.
The conclusion a receiving organisation reaches is therefore local and specific, rather than a universal status attached to a person:
“Meets Organisation X requirements” — not “Competent”.
The organisation accepting the worker keeps that decision
A worker's whole history is rarely the question
Competency records about a person are personal information. A customer needing evidence that a worker satisfies one role should not receive that worker's complete qualification, training, employment and medical history in order to get it.
OpenCompetency is built around purpose-specific presentation: private by default, disclosing only what the stated purpose requires, with the intended recipient and purpose identifiable. It should not create a universal worker number, and existing government, licence or qualification identifiers should not quietly become one.
Consent is not assumed to be the only lawful basis for sharing. Employers and other organisations may have other lawful bases; each participating organisation remains responsible for identifying and documenting its own.
Where this is up to
OpenCompetency is an early-stage proposal, not a completed standard. No exchange protocol, schema, or conformance suite exists yet.
The current stage is testing the problem and assumptions with employers, workers, buyers, qualification organisations, assessment providers, and technology providers. Disagreement is useful — including reasons the approach will not work.