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Reducing costs in the production process is paramount to the existence of especially small and medium sized enterprises in today's market. One approach is to make the machines themselves more reliable, thereby reducing their downtimes The other angle to he considered are human resources. The modern term of 'empowerment of people' applies also to the machine operators. The more the personnel at the machine is capable of repairing or preventing damage, the lower the costs for this repair and the shorter the down-time. This means, operators have to be supported in the fault-finding process by a knowledge-based decision-support system. Diagnostic tools bear the danger of people relying too much on them and their capabilities, so that after a while the formerly competent personnel looses their competence. The questions how to prevent this from happening and how to even increase competence on the job is answered by presenting a multi-agent architecture and an instrument to measure competence enhancement. ComPASS (Competence Promoting Multi-Agent System for Support) was developed for the area of fault diagnostic of CNC (Computerized Numerical Control) machine tools. Main benefits of the integration of ComPASS into existing conventional diagnostic systems are the modularization of machine specific knowledge and the capability of knowledge representation in different views. The evaluation of the system consisted of two parts: the evaluation of the software regarding its usability and the effect on the change of the user's competence. To measure the effect on the user's competence, a knowledge test with special methods was developed. It includes task executions at the machine for troubleshooting and a questionnaire for the evaluation of the fault situation. The degree of competence was measured with dependent variables such as different types of knowledge, diagnostic success, skills and stress. Each variable was determined by one or more questionnaires and practical tests.