To promote the mobility of nursing professionals among the countries members of the European Union may be an efficient measure to alleviate the shortage of nurses. An important limitation for this mobility consists in the lack of knowledge about the different cultures and with regards to the competencies, formation and nursing practices which exist in these distinct countries. At the present time, there is no method or instrument available which permits a comparison. The EHTAN, the European Healthcare Teaching and Accreditation Network, project proposes a methodology to evaluate and self-evaluate competencies by means of a tool, a competency matrix, developed for this purpose. In this article, the authors introduce the work carried out during the first phases of this project.