The Vision underlying G.E.M. is that the traditional CV should be considered an obsolete communication means and that a new standard of curriculum, the DCV Digital Curriculum VitaeŽ software, needs to be refined, promoted, adopted and diffused widely throughout Europe, both within private industries and public administrations. The usage of the DCV standard has the potential to overcome some of the organisational and technical obstacles to the creation of a Global Employment Marketplace and to stimulate and revitalise the EU employment market. The new approach will fully exploit the opportunity offered by modern Information and Communication Technologies and will facilitate the emergence of a new communication standard between labour demand and labour supply, based on computerised tools which allow users to create, save, transmit (by Internet, for example), receive, store, query, recall and manage curricula vitae of the new generation.

G.E.M. was funded during 1998-1999 by the European Community under the ESPRIT Programme (project n° 28108) with the goal of normalising, refining and testing already existing software technologies and products that collectively comprise the infrastructure and tools necessary to achieve the vision of the Digital Curriculum Vitae (DCV) becoming the new standard for buyers and sellers of labour to exchange information in the marketplace. As the funded phase winds down, the most important aim of G.E.M. becomes that of diffusing the new infrastructure and tools to as many labour market participants as might find the DCV system useful. The vehicle for this diffusion process will be the Network of Excellence (NoE).

The purpose of G.E.M. is to normalise Economic Sectors, Study Titles, Organisational Units and Occupational Titles across all EU Countries (languages, cultures and industrial contexts), based upon standard and internationally accepted classifications. During the funded phase 5 Countries have participated (I, UK, A, F and E) and a set of Economic Sectors, Occupational Titles, etc. have been selected with the aim of reaching a critical mass in order to diffuse the DCV system within the EU. The results of the normalisation work are now publicly available for dissemination and research purposes through a software freely downloadable from this website which enables an off line consultation of the Electronic Dictionary. The Business Schools participating in the G.E.M. project have been mainly responsible for the normalisation activity, under the methodological co-ordination of Bocconi University. It should be noted no software development was included in the G.E.M. project; all software development has occurred outside the project with full funding by the manufacturer of the commercial CVBase System.