The COCAL project aims to address the upskilling needs of the banking sector, by developing, applying and validating a holistic approach for the combined management of competencies and learning resources. COCAL will develop a central and commonly used reference model for competencies, as the basis for interoperability between and exchange of competence data, which will be extended to also cover learning content and facilitate competency-based content acquisition and learning. Overall, the project sets to:

• improve competency modeling in the banking sector, by better aligning business requirements and competencies
• create a competencies framework matching the requirements of the sector
• align business roles with people and their learning processes
• promote innovative ways for content creation, linked to and driven by competency management and pedagogical approaches
• promote the exploitation of open content through competency-based content federation
• link training to performance appraisals. Performance results will serve as indicators of the learning content’s quality.

In this project IMC works on the technical and functional specification of the COCAL prototype, the Competency Analyzer based on the "Open SOA for Learning" specification developed by the PROLIX project and functionalities available by CLIX Talent Suite. Furthermore, based on the results of the OpenScout project, an integrated access to learning resources stored in external content repositories will be ensured. Web services will allow a competency- and skill-based description of contents and their search and retrieval. In the context of COCAL these services will be adapted/ enhanced to serve the needs of the banking sector.