Career Plus tool by ICS

Career Plus is an online tool of  with the aim to allow IT professionals in Ireland to measure and map their competences against a recognised European standard- e-CF.

The European e-Competence Framework (e-CF) provides a reference of 41 competencies as required and applied in an IT professional work context, using a common language for competencies, skills, knowledge, and proficiency levels that is applied and understood across Europe.

This interactive tool assists IT professionals at various stages of their career to match their skills against common IT job profiles. They are able able to find out any skills they are missing to reach your career goals, and prove their current skills. This can be useful for a potential promotion or new job.

Users can map their competencies and the 30 ICT Professional Role Profiles identified by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). These are typical roles performed by ICT Professionals in any organisation, covering the full ICT business processes using the e-CF as the basis for competence identification and illuminates each ICT Professional Profile with a number of components including work outcomes or “Deliverables”.


The e-CF is an EU standard that can be used by public and private companies as well as the education sector as a common language for describing digital competences of IT professionals. The accompanying ICT Profile tool brings the e-CF into practice by grouping its competences under specific ICT roles. The e-CF 4.0 was published at the end of 2019, and there is great potential to be adopted broadly and to facilitate digital transformation, hiring and upskilling of new professionals as well as better communication between industry and education.

The 5 dimensions of the e-CF are as follows:

  1. e-Competence Areas
    Derived from the IT macro processes PLAN –BUILD –RUN – ENABLE – MANAGE. They provide the entry point to the e-Competences and reflect a process perspective based upon the waterfall approach. However, the e-CF is equally relevant to the steps applied in agile process structures such as Agile/ DevOps lifecycles.
  2. e-Competences
    41 e-Competences in total provide the European standard references of IT Professional competence as required and performed in IT work context. Each dimension 2 description contains a competence title and a generic competence description, defined from an organisational perspective.
  3. 5 Proficiency Levels
    5 e-Competence proficiency levels characterised by increasing levels of context complexity, autonomy, influence and typical behaviour. To each e-Competence, specifically relevant proficiency levels are assigned. The dimension 3 level descriptors provide the individual perspective of competence performance. dimension 3 level descriptors provide the individual perspective of competence performance.
  4. Knowledge and Skills
    Examples of knowledge and skills relate to the e-Competences generic descriptions in Dimension 2. These examples are provided to add value to the competence descriptor and are not intended to be exhaustive. They offer inspiration and orientation for the identification of further specific knowledge and skills assignment according to contextual needs.

Given the importance of the definition of digital competence for IT professionals, it is an excellent best practice to have the ICS-developed Career Plus available to help IT Professionals in Ireland to navigate the European e-Competence Framework available. It ensures that there is an appropriate understanding of the importance of professional competence in a world that depends on substantially on systems and protocols developed by this critical cohort of professionals.

Initiative Information

Website link
Organization url
e-CF Explorer
Target audience
Digital skills for ICT professionals and other digital experts.
Digital technology / specialisation
Cybersecurity
Artificial Intelligence
Internet of Things
Blockchain
Quantum Computing
Digital skill level
Advanced
Digital Expert
Intermediate
Geographic Scope - Country
European Union
Type of initiative
EU institutional initiative
Industry - Field of Education and Training
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) not further defined
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