From Competence Gaps to Career Growth: the CROSS Platform Takes Shape
ResearchComp, the European Competence Framework for Researchers, has given institutions, researchers and non-academic stakeholders a shared language to talk about skills and competences. But having a common framework is only the first step. The real challenge is putting it into practice: using it to audit training portfolios, guide individual development, and connect people to the right resources at the right moment. That is exactly what we try to create in CROSS by building a platform around four interconnected pillars, forming a complete lifecycle for researcher development.
Pillar 1: Institutional Diagnostic Engine
Institutions can upload their training catalogue (incl. formal courses, workshops, and informal learning opportunities) and have it automatically mapped against all 39 ResearchComp competences. The result is a clear strategic picture: where training is strong, where critical competences are missing, and what steps to take next. Initial piloting with real institutional data confirms the tool’s efficiency and capability of surfacing actionable insights.
Pillar 2: Researcher Career Development Suite
Building on the European Commission's ResearchComp Self-Assessment Tool, this pillar allows researchers to import their assessment results directly into the CROSS platform. From there, they can explore how their strengths align with different career paths, work on articulating their skills to employers across various sectors and get pointed straight to training modules that address their specific gaps in order to provide a dynamic, personalised development journey.
Pillar 3: Shared Pan-European Training Database
Rather than letting valuable resources remain siloed within individual projects or institutions, the platform brings them together in one searchable place, making it easy to find and reuse what already exists before building something new. Therefore, we propose a curated, searchable database of training materials drawn from partner institutions, EURAXESS, and various ongoing and past European projects. A recommendation engine matches researchers to the most relevant resources and helps institutions identify existing materials they can adopt rather than duplicate.
Pillar 4: Integrated Learning Management System
The CROSS Platform hosts the entire learning journey in one place. Institutions can upload, manage, and deliver training content directly within the ecosystem. And because everything shares the same data model, a new course added to an institution's catalogue is immediately available for diagnostic mapping and researcher enrolment alike.
What makes the CROSS Platform distinctive is not any single pillar but the way they work together. When an institution identifies a gap in its training portfolio, the platform can immediately suggest existing resources from the shared database. When a researcher identifies a personal competence gap, they can enrol in a relevant course without leaving the platform. And as data accumulates across institutions and researchers, it generates pan-European evidence on which competences are most in need of attention, informing not just institutional strategy but broader policy discussions across the European Research Area.
Invitation to express interest in testing the platform
The first prototype is operational, and the team is actively developing the platform further over the coming months, both refining the user experience and expanding the training database. We look forward to receiving your early feedback during this development phase so that we can build solutions that will address your needs.
Interested in being among the first to explore what it can do for your institution or your own career development? Register your interest here and we'll get in touch with you.