Developing competency in the broad area of bioinformatics is challenging globally, owing to the breadth of the field and the diversity of its audiences for education and training. Course design can be facilitated by the use of a competency framework – a set of competency requirements that define the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed by individuals in (or aspiring to be in) a particular profession or role. These competency requirements can help to define curricula as they can inform both the content and level to which competency needs to bedeveloped. The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) developed a list of bioinformatics competencies in 2014, and these have undergone several rounds of improvement. In consultation with a broad bioinformatics training community, these have now been further refined and extended to include knowledge skills and attitudes, and mappings to previous and other existing competency frameworks. Here we present version 3 of the ISCB competency framework. We describe how it was developed and how to access it, as well as providing some examples of how it has been used. The framework is openly accessible at https://competency.ebi.ac.uk/framework/iscb/3.0/competencies.