Competence-based HRM reforms in public administrations often remain trapped in formal compliance because competence taxonomies, templates, and platform inscriptions must be translated into locally credible and administratively governable routines. This paper examines how inter-organisational knowledge brokering enables such translation in SKiLL-PA, a national, platform-mediated reform programme designed to institutionalise strategic, competency-based HRM and to connect competence modelling to workforce planning and development. We adopt a qualitative, process-oriented single-case study of UNI-1, a mid-sized public university in inland Southern Italy, drawing on interviews, documentary analysis, and direct observation. Findings show that implementation effectiveness hinged on a formally mandated academic coordinator acting as the primary knowledge broker across organisational interfaces and internal domains. Brokerage unfolded through a patterned repertoire of mechanisms: sense-giving and shared framing to reduce equivocality; translation and reframing of competence language to align behavioural competences with situated work; artefact-mediated alignment through versioned templates and traceable decision logs; cross-domain convening to integrate HR modelling with budgetary sustainability; negotiated bounded flexibility to reconcile standardisation with role hybridity; data management to secure informational integrity; legitimacy work with governance and social partners; and iterative learning routines that stabilised interpretations over time. The findings extend knowledge management research by showing how brokering work aligns interpretive, socio-technical, and institutional layers in platform-mediated competence reforms, framing inter-organisational knowledge transfer as negotiated translation rather than a top-down transmission.