The implementation of lifelong learning in vocational education systems implies that courses should be more individualised and flexible. In other words, vocational education must incorporate new elements of flexibility and facilitate increased individualisation and, thus, curricular reforms are necessary to respond to the demands of lifelong learning. One of the possibilities to ensure flexibility and increased individualisation is designing the learning processes based on competencies. Competence-based education (CBE) is an important educational trend in The Netherlands, UK, United States and Australia (Velde, 1999; Descy and Thessaring, 2001). "Competence is the integrated performance-oriented capability of a person or an organisation to reach specific achievements" (Mulder, 2001, p. 76). CBE implies creating opportunities for students and workers, close to their world of experience in a meaningful learning environment wherein the learner can develop integrated, performance-oriented capabilities to handle the core problems in practice (Wesselink et al., 2003). The introduction of CBE has an impact on the roles and corresponding competencies of teaching professionals (Descy and Tessaring, 2001). The roles and corresponding competencies of a teacher in CBE are rather different from those in a more traditional instruction-based learning environment. Lassnigg (2000) suggests for example to prepare teachers for their new role in CBE to train them to perform tasks comparable with tasks of human resource managers in enterprises, instead of systematically focusing on updating on the educational function. Wesselink et al. (2003) formulated ten principles for designing CBE and concluded that the roles of the teacher are conditional for realising the desired results. In this article, the focus is on the following roles of teachers in CBE: coach, assessor and subject matter expert. These three roles are used as starting point, which does not dismiss the possibility that other roles can appear on the basis of the gathered data. First question addressed in this contribution is which competencies correspond with the various roles of a (good) teacher in CBE? At present, all over the world many attempts are being made to describe these qualities by means of lists of competencies (Becker et al., 2003 in Korthagen, 2004). However doubts have been raised about the validity, reliability and practicality of such lists. Korthagen (2004) states that it is possible to make use of those lists, but it is important to take into account the beliefs, identity and mission of the teacher. On the basis of several lists of competencies (for teachers), first consultations of teachers in practice and with the remarks of Korthagen in mind, competence profiles for the different roles in competence-based education were realised. The second question of this paper will focus on the question to what extent the teachers think these roles and corresponding competencies are important in CBE and to what extent they think they master these competencies. In a study of good practices of CBE, three different schools for secondary and higher agricultural education participated. On these three schools 21 teachers, who are actually working in a competence-based learning environment, were questioned in an interview. Despite the fact that teachers are able to express how they currently see themselves as professionals (Beijaard et al., 1999), students and managers were consulted to validate the data. The results on both questions will be described and discussed in the paper.