Across thirty European jurisdictions – the twenty-seven Member States of the European Union together with Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom – we examine three closely entangled dimensions of board competence: pre-appointment training, continuous professional development, and qualification requirements for the appointment of non-executive directors and members of supervisory boards (NEDs) of listed companies. Drawing on national contributions to the ecoDa Education Committee, on desk research into national codes and supervisory guidance, and on the literature on board effectiveness and director human capital, we find an almost unanimous principles-based architecture: not a single jurisdiction treats any of the three dimensions as a formal statutory precondition for appointment. This regulatory restraint nonetheless coexists with a dense mesh of soft-law expectations, professional-body obligations and sector-specific suitability regimes that together produce, de facto, a European floor of competence. The operative regulatory grammar of European board education is therefore neither hard law nor soft law in isolation, but their stratified interaction – an architecture at once permissive in form and demanding in substance. The paper offers a framework for thinking about board education as a layered governance technology and draws practical implications for directors’ associations, regulators, listed companies and individual NEDs.