Lifelong learning refers to the activities people perform throughout their life to improve their competence in a particular field. Although adaptive educational hypermedia systems (AEHS) bare the potential to provide personalized learning experiences based on individual?s knowledge, skills, and competencies, so far they have been confined in the provision of knowledge resources that are adaptively selected based on the structure of concepts a domain model. In this paper, we address the problem of designing adaptive educational hypermedia systems for supporting lifelong competence development. To this end, we propose an alternative to the traditional subject domain specific design approach which is based on the use of competence description ontology and learner?s competence records.