In our fast changing global village, the wealth of nations and the wealth of individuals are to some extent determined by a production factor which is called human capital. Nations are seen to be more competitive and therefore create a higher level of wealth if they have a better educated workforce. On an individual basis human capital, which is seen as ones skills and competencies, also define the success on the labor market. This success on the labor market generates individual wealth. The probability of an individual receiving a proper job is assumed to be higher, if the skills, competencies and signals of the employee reflect the skills, competencies and signals required at the job market. This dissertation wants to explore the required skills, competencies and signals by screening job announcements and analyze them via text mining techniques. (author's abstract) Part I chapter I gives an overview of relevant literature, which deals with the economic dimension of knowledge. Starting from the idea of the knowledge based economy the question: "What is useful knowledge?" is raised and discussed with the ideas of Mokyr (2005). These ideas form the framework of the heuristic model for job announcement based competence classification (see chapter: 2.5). This classification is the foundation of the first application of curricular investigation 8. To fill the framework with content, the historical development of the role of skills, competencies and signals is shortly discussed. Starting with the competence and skill dimension in the famous book "Wealth of Nations" from Smith (1868) the dissertation focuses on the 1960's where Schultz (1961) (re-) invented the idea of human capital and the importance of investing in this factor. Theodore W. Schultz received a nobel prize for his ideas. Additionally disparities and similarities according to the approaches of Bourdieu (2005) as a famous sociologist and nobel laureate Spence (1973) are disputed. Chapter 2 debates personal competence from an educational perspective. After discussing "What is educational quality" and "Who is interested in high quality education" it is argued, that employability seems to be important for all stakeholder groups. Basic concepts of employability skills and competencies are defined. Theory comparison in chapter 2.5 leads to a heuristic model for job announcement based competence classification. However, this model could be applied for different problems. Chapter 3 defines the role of the job announcements (and its contained skills and competencies) and critical assumptions which lie behind the analysis of job announcements. Part II explains the used methodology by explaining how the data were harvested from the internet (chapter 4). Data were pre- and post processed (chapter 5) and job announcements were connected with their regional origin (chapter 7). Part III shows two possible applications. The first application is a text mining based context analysis of financial related job announcements to help finding strategies to support curriculum planning focused on employability (see chapter 8). The second application shows (regional) credential inflation effects based on the core/periphery model of Krugman (1991) which are seen as an "adverse reaction" of the knowledge based economy idea (see chapter 9). (author's abstract)