This chapter explores how we create and support a digitally enabled, agile, competent, and ultimately, productive workforce and determines the key research questions that need to be addressed if Digital Built Britain (DBB) is to provide return on investment and succeed as the catalyst for evolving the manner in which we conceive, plan, design, construct, operate, and interact with the built environment. The proposed vision is a digital competency management ecosystem where interdependent stakeholders are incentivised to work together in coopetition to create, capture, infer, interpret, specify, integrate, accredit, apply, use, monitor, and evolve competence as a working (data) asset. This needs to be in a consistent, objective, explicit, and scalable manner, with end2end transparency and traceability for all stakeholders that overcome the challenges of competency management. Moreover, a core element must be an ecosystem organised around digital infrastructure of competency frameworks and other knowledge sources of competence, so that competency frameworks are in digital operation and dynamic context.
