As the digital digital identity & trust services field continues to grow in complexity and significance, there is a pressing need to define what it truly means to be professionally competent in this space. The Competencies & Skills Validation initiative aims to provide a rigorous, inclusive, and forward-looking foundation for recognizing professional capabilities across the sector.
Digital identity and trust services involve a wide spectrum of job roles—spanning technical, compliance, policy, and operational functions. However, these roles often lack clear definitions, and the required skillsets and responsibilities vary widely across organizations and jurisdictions.
To bring clarity, we initiate participatory studies and structured dialogues with professionals, employers, regulators, and academic partners to:
We move beyond theoretical profiles to establish credible, validated models of professional performance, anchored in what professionals actually do and need to know.
Our approach to defining professional competence is grounded in the lived realities of those working within digital identity and trust services. We work closely with professionals and organizations across the ecosystem to build a shared understanding of what effective performance truly looks like, both in technical execution and ethical responsibility.
Once validated, our findings are translated into:
Our work is rooted in inclusive participation. We actively engage professionals from public institutions, private organizations, academia, and civil society to ensure that our frameworks represent the breadth of perspectives and expertise across the digital trust ecosystem. This commitment ensures that our outputs are:
By defining and validating professional competencies, we help:
The evolving regulatory landscape shaped by directives such as eIDAS 2.0 and NIS2, is driving organizations to take a more structured and proactive approach to workforce development in cybersecurity and digital identity. These regulations not only emphasize security and compliance but also introduce a growing demand for transparency, accountability, and demonstrable competencies among professionals in key roles.
To meet these demands, the European Cybersecurity Skills Framework (ECSF) offers a foundation for defining and aligning professional roles, responsibilities, and required competencies, by bringing greater consistency across industry, academia, and government by standardizing what is expected from professionals.
Informed by ECSF, we have analyzed and aligned its role-based profiles with real-world competency needs in the digital identity and trust services domain. Our work supports the development of targeted credentials and professional pathways that reflect European regulatory priorities and help professionals advance their careers with clarity and recognition.
As part of our methodology, we conduct a systematic analysis of international regulations, frameworks, and technical standards relevant to digital identity and trust services. This includes examining instruments such as eIDAS 2.0, NIS2, the UK DIATF, Australia’s TDIF, and Singapore’s NDI ecosystem, among others. Through structured comparative analysis, we identify implicit and explicit references to workforce competence, training obligations, and role-based responsibilities.
To complement our regulatory intelligence, we systematically integrate established cross-sectoral workforce development and evaluation frameworks—most notably the European Cybersecurity Skills Framework (ECSF). These frameworks provide a structured vocabulary and validated approach for defining knowledge, skills, and tasks (KSTs) across cybersecurity and digital trust domains.
Industry Insight: Gathering workforce challenges, role-specific practices, and professional trends.
Competencies & Skills Validation: Defining and validating essential skills and professional requirements.
Structured models describing the required skills, knowledge, and behaviors for specific job roles.
Identifying and validating how professionals from adjacent IT/cybersecurity fields can enter and progress into domain-specific roles, as well as progressing seniority and specialization across the digital ideneity & trust services domain.
Validated, vendor-neutral professional certifications that demonstrate verified knowledge and competence.
Continuous professional development offerings to support lifelong learning and skill relevance.
Explore key publications developed as part of our Competencies & Skills Validation initiative. Papers such as policy briefs, position statements, and strategic insights, highlight our commitment to evidence-based workforce development for digital identity and trust services.
Through this initiative, we aim to ensure that professional capabilities in digital identity and trust are clearly defined, rigorously validated, and widely recognized.
Want to be part of this effort?
