Competence-based approaches in the field of formal or non-formal education and training are becoming more common and appear to offer the opportunity to develop programmes that meet needs of learners, trainers and potential employers. To support the provision of competence-based learning services, it is necessary to maintain a record of an individual?s competences in a persistent and standard way. In this paper, we investigate the problem of defining a common metadata model for the description of competencies based on the application of the current state-of-the-art specification (namely, the IMS RDCEO) in describing competencies, in a real case study, that is, the EuroPass Language Passport. To this end, we identify four open issues on the description capabilities of the IMS RDCEO specification, and propose possible extensions to its information model, demonstrating their application in practice.