Over the years competence-based approaches in the field of formal and non-formal education are becoming more common and appear to offer the opportunity to develop flexible e-training programs that bare the potential to meet lifelong learning needs. For corporate training a competence-based approach may help in identifying competence gaps towards designing competence development programmes for improving employees? performance. In order to provide competence based training, a clear description of competences is needed. However, different organizations may define the same competences in different ways due to different organizational processes. Thus, enabling technologies and infrastructures for facilitating the synchronization for the creation of commonly identifiable competence descriptions are required. In this paper, we argue that the use of web-based observatories as enabling technology for common description of competences can serve this purpose, and we present the TenC Competence Observatory demonstrating the potential of this approach.