How SFIA works
What SFIA is and is not
SFIA's skills are basic units of professional capability. They are not complete descriptions of jobs or roles. For example software engineers need more SFIA skills than merely "Programming"; business analysts need more SFIA skills than just "Business analysis".
In addition to SFIA's professional skills, IT people need appropriate behavioural skills and the right knowledge and experience. Most organisations have their own view of behavioural skills - though some of the essentials are implied by the definitions in SFIA's seven generic levels. Knowledge and experience in IT are moving targets: they show significant variation from one industry or organisation to another, and they change with time. Both of these areas will be described in your job descriptions and professional profiles, but are not part of SFIA.
So SFIA is a highly usableand flexible component of the management of skills and capability. It does not force any particular approach on the organisation.
Levels in SFIA
A great strength of SFIA is its system of levels: this provides a logical background to the skill definitions. This axis of the framework defines the different levels of responsibility and accountability exercised by IT practitioners. Each of seven generic levels - from new entrant to the most senior level - is defined in terms of autonomy, influence, complexity and business skills.
In addition, each level has a memorable tag, as shown in the diagram.
The full definitions of the levels of responsibility are in the Levels of responsibility section.
Skills in categories and subcategories
SFIA's other axis presents the whole set of SFIA skills. These are defined in a way that makes them easily recognisable in the workplace: the practical nature of the descriptions means that they can effectively be used to describe the capabilities of a person and the needs of a job or class of professionals.
The skills are presented for convenience in categories which are further broken down into subcategories.
The categories and subcategories are purely for the convenience of the SFIA user: they form a navigation aid. For example, SFIA does not claim to be offering a standard definition of the term 'Business change', nor is it suggesting that this should be the title of a business role or job. It is simply a heading under which to group certain related skills.
Skills are described at several levels
The resulting matrix shows the complete set of skills used by IT practitioners. SFIA provides an overall description for each skill, supported by a description of how the skill appears at each level of competency at which it is recognised. A skill does not normally appear at all seven levels.
