The global skills and competency framework for the digital world

SFIA Levels of responsibility

The generic attributes that characterise SFIA’s seven levels of responsibility and accountability provide the underlying structure of the SFIA Framework. They ensure that the definitions of professional skills are defined in a way that makes their different levels recognisably distinct and aligned to the levels of responsibility.

The power of the levels of responsibility

As well as providing the fundamental structure of the SFIA Framework, the seven levels of responsibility also provide a basis of mapping for professional career pathways, corporate structures and other frameworks. The nature of the generic attributes makes them suitable as the basis of core competencies, mappings and stages within a career path.

  • An organisation that already has a set of core competencies or values can use them in combination with SFIA’s professional skills and benefit from the spacing that the SFIA levels provide and the international recognition afforded by a global common standard.

  • An organisation, a professional body or trade association for instance, that wishes to map its own established structure to SFIA can do so using the levels of responsibility characterised by the generic attributes as the basis of such a mapping.

Universal applicability

SFIA originated as a framework for the ICT community. It has evolved to be a framework that defines the skills and competencies required by business and technology professionals who design, develop, implement, manage and protect the data and technology that power the digital world.

SFIA is used across a breadth of business and professional functions. Many roles in industry are blended and require a mix of technical and non-technical skills and SFIA is ideally suited to this.

SFIA's universal applicability means that it can readily be applied and also extended beyond the digital professions into any technical or non-technical domain. The user base continues to find new areas to use SFIA, which is a visible sign of SFIA's usefulness, integrity and flexible design.

SFIA enables integration of different professional work using the levels of responsibility as the foundation, whether that be framework to framework or an organisation's structure to the SFIA Framework. This provides a global common reference model for integration.