This paper offers a comparative analysis of the legal, regulatory and soft-law frameworks governing three closely entangled dimensions of the competence architecture of non-executive directors and members of supervisory boards (NEDs) of listed companies across Europe: pre-appointment training, continuous professional development (CPD), and qualification requirements for appointment. Drawing on national contributions coordinated through the ecoDa Education Committee, complemented by desk research on company law, stock-exchange rules, national corporate governance codes and the supervisory guidance of EBA, ESMA and EIOPA, and situated within the scholarly literature on board effectiveness and director human capital, the study compares eighteen European jurisdictions. The findings reveal an almost unanimous principles-based architecture: no Member State treats any of the three dimensions as a formal statutory precondition for NED appointment. Yet this apparent regulatory restraint coexists with a dense mesh of soft-law expectations, professional-body obligations and sector-specific suitability regimes which together produce, de facto, a European floor of competence. The paper argues that the true regulatory grammar of NED competence in Europe is neither hard law nor soft law in isolation, but their stratified interaction.