The importance given to competency management is well justified. Acquiring new competencies is the central goal of any education or knowledge management process. Thus, it must be embedded in any software framework as an instructional engineering tool, to inform the runtime environment of the knowledge that is processed by actors, and their situation toward achieving competency-acquisition objectives. We present here some of our results in the last 10 years that have led to an ontology for designing competency-based learning and knowledge management applications. Based on this ontology, we present a software framework for ontology-driven e-learning systems. (Contains 6 tables and 13 figures.)