Question
Question 1
Explain why a framework like SFIA is important to the ICT profession?
Question 2
You have a resume already, how do you think you would change it now that you understand the SFIA Framework? Would you use the SFIA Framework to highlight your current achievements and make them seem like a path to somewhere or would you have it simply be a record of your achievements and skills?
Identify the parts of your resume that would be changed. Discuss this with your classmates and collectively come up with a summary of the parts to be changed.
Write no more than a page on this.
Question 3
You have been asked to assess your generic skills and their levels of responsibility using the SFIA Framework. At what level of responsibility would you assess your current 4 generic skills? Explain why you think that your skills are currently at this level.
SEMINAR
Introduction
In this part of the course you will learn how to use SFIA (pronounced “Sophia”), the Skills Framework for the Information Age, to map your own particular ICT and generic skill sets. SFIA is widely recognised as the premier skills framework and key workforce alignment tool in the ICT world. SFIA is used by ICT professionals (of all levels), HR departments, educators and organisations, in nearly 200 countries to map ICT skills.
During the course of the next week or so, you will learn how to use SFIA to help you plan your future career and then use this tool to assist you in identifying and obtaining employment and planning future professional development throughout the rest of your working life.
Later in your career you may become involved in planning the IT workforce requirements for an organisation, and again SFIA will be of great value to you, because it will assist you in identifying the precise skills that the organisation needs to employ, and at what levels they need to be.
For now, you might like to watch the following short video that introduces you to SFIA and provides an overview of how it can be used for capability development both personally and from an organisational perspective. Do note that the this video relates to SFIA Ver 5, however the principles are still relevant.
About SFIA
SFIA was originally developed in conjunction with the British Computer Society, the UK government, and with considerable help from several large IT organisations (including IBM and Microsoft).
As the SFIA Foundation states, “SFIA was produced by the ICT industry, for the ICT industry.” Nowadays, the SFIA Framework is independently owned and managed by the not-for-profit SFIA Foundation, which is still based in the UK, and is supported by a number of Accredited Partners, such as the ACS, and a number of important IT organisations, but they have no control over it, and own no part of it. This is very important to insure that the SFIA framework remains free of bias, so that it can truly represent the IT industry as a whole.
Currently SFIA is in release version 6.
It is a logical two-dimensional skills framework defined by areas of work on mapped against levels of responsibility. It has been proven as an effective resource that benefits business by facilitating all aspects of the management of capability in corporate and educational environments.
SFIA recognises 7 levels of responsibility and maps each skill against these levels.
IT skills are derived from various contexts:
- Professional Skills
- Behavioural Skills
- Knowledge
- Experience and Qualifications
SFIA Generic Skills
SFIA’s professional levels of responsibility are expressed in terms of the four generic skills of
- Autonomy
- Complexity
- Influence
- Business Skills
For a new graduate, we would expect that you would be able to identify most of your generic skills as being at level 3, with some at level 4.
SFIA Professional Skills
The Professional Skills are arranged into 6 categories:
- Strategy and architecture
- Change and Transformation
- Development and Implementation
- Delivery and Operation
- Skills and Quality
- Relationship and Engagement
These are further divided into sub-categories for a total of 97 skills, each defined with its own level of responsibility.
When assessing your professional skills, you must be able to assess your generic skills at the same or a higher level in order to be able to assess a particular skill.
Stop and Consider
- Many of you have been involved in other than IT work since coming to Australia, and possible in your own country. You should include this type of work and life experience in seeking to assess your behavioral and other generic skills.
- When seeking to assess professional skills, you should choose 3 or 4 related skills, usually in one category or sub-category, and assess your level of competence in each skill. This will also provide you with evidence of your short-falls, and help you plan for future skill development.
How Can SFIA Help MeWhat’s in it for me?
SFIA enables you to objectively define and talk about ICT Professional Skills – the building blocks with which to build your career. As a young ICT professional you will discover on this course how SFIA can be used to help you assess your skills and plan your career. Building upon this foundation, and as your knowledge of SFIA increases, you will become more articulate in its language, and you will be able to have valuable conversations with a wider range of ICT and non-ICT people about your career development using SFIA as a common language.
Matching people with jobs
SFIA is not concerned with roles or job titles; instead it describes what people actually do, and what experience an organisation requires them to have in order to carry out specific roles. It is an experience based capabilities framework that helps both employers and employees match skills expectations.
The main purpose of SFIA is to ensure that there is a good match between your skills, and the skills that are required by an organisation. It is an aid to enable you to identify and measure each individual ICT skill that you have and it allows ICT employers to identify and measure the skills that they require for a particular position, thus making it possible for both of you to determine objectively if there is a good match.
In other words, SFIA provides you and prospective employers with a common language.
Workforce alignment
Traditionally, employers have “estimated” which roles they require in their organisation, i.e. they may decide they need two Business Analysts (BA’s), ten programmers, a Database Analyst (DBA), and so on. This is very subjective however, because different people will have different views of what a BA, a DBA, or programmer actually does. Often, people within the same organisation have differing views about the same role, and those views change over time, dependent on the particular projects requiring specific types of ICT skillsets.
Wouldn’t it be much more sensible if the organisation was to determine all the skills required to meet its needs, and the levels at which those skills need to be? Then it could group together sets of these skills into specifically identified roles.
So, SFIA allows for the organisation to be able to advertise for a BA, as well as provide a list of the actuals skills and levels required. This way, everyone involved in the recruitment process can speak the same language.
A job description cannot be fully defined by a set of SFIA skills however, so the organisation must also include required or desirable knowledge, experience, qualifications and context too. It is recommended not to include codes and levels in a resume unless the job advertisement requires this information. Using the SFIA language and descriptors is recommended, as this can be understood by a wide audience, and that is the intended purpose of this framework.
Does SFIA identify just my Professional Skills?
No, SFIA identifies two sets of skills, your “generic skills” (related to your behavioural skills), as well as your SFIA skills (also known as “professional”, “technical” or “specialist” skills). During the course of this online program you are working primarily on increasing your generic skills, whilst mapping and planning the development of your professional skills.
Assessing your Skills
SFIA is based on the assumption that everyone possesses at least 2 sets of skills:
Generic Skills
This is the umbrella set of skills. You cannot be a level 5 in any professional skill UNLESS you can prove level 5 in all of the generic skills. These are related more to your personal abilities and “soft skills”, and include the degree to which you can work alone, your level of decision making, your ability to influence, and your ability to direct and lead others. The also include the level of difficulty and unpredictability that you face in your daily work, and how well you work in a professional environment (excluding your professional skills).
Your Generic skills can range from level 1 (called “Follow”), to Level 7 (called “Set strategy, inspire, mobilise”). Level 1 is a beginner, whereas an IT Master’s graduate with some experience would be level 3 (called “Apply”), and a C.I.O should be at level 7.
Professional Skills
These are your actual IT skills such as Network Design, Programming, Testing, Quality Assurance, and so on. SFIA v6 lists 97 IT skills in total, of which you will have only a few.
The SFIA skill levels are measured in exactly the same way as generic skills, i.e. from level 1 (follow) to level 7 (set strategy, inspire, mobilise). But most SFIA skills cover only 3, 4, or 5 levels. With SFIA 6, there are no skills that cover all 7 levels of responsibility.
NB As previously indicated it is impossible to have a SFIA skill that is at a higher level than your Generic skills.
You should download a copy of the skills which is provided with this week’s resources for reference and analysis of your skills. This will also help you in the activity of assessing your generic skills.
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