The global skills and competency framework for the digital world

SFIA evolution and ecosystem

The background

Evolution of SFIA

First published in 2000, SFIA has evolved through successive updates as a result of expert input by its global users to ensure that it remains relevant and useful to the needs of the industry and business.

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.

Within the scope of SFIA are many of the world's most in-demand occupations, encompassing professionals working in areas such as — but not limited to:

  • information and communications technology
  • business change
  • digital transformation
  • data science and analytics
  • software engineering
  • information and cyber security
  • learning and education
  • applied computing and computational science
  • user centred design
  • digital product development, sales and marketing
  • human resource and workforce management.

SFIA 8 continues the evolution. It has been updated in response to many change requests from industry. Many of the existing skills have been updated and additional skills introduced but the key concepts and essential values of SFIA remain true, as they have done for over 20 years.

SFIA's design principles and structure are unchanged

One of the reasons for the great success and global footprint of the SFIA standard is that it reflects reality within industry. The SFIA levels describe recognisable levels of responsibility and accountability — this is universally liked by SFIA users.

This is why the structure of SFIA has remained the same — 7 levels of responsibility characterised by generic attributes which describe behavioural factors, along with professional skills and competencies described at one or more of those 7 levels.

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.

The SFIA ecosystem

More than just a skills and competencies framework

This describes some of the range of activities of the SFIA Foundation. They are not core elements of the SFIA Framework and may not be generally visible to the user community but they are key to the Foundation's activities. 

Including

  • User guidance
  • Mappings to industry frameworks
  • Links to industry bodies of knowledge
  • SFIA accredited partners and specialists
  • Skills mapped to standard roles
  • SFIA accredited training 
  • Not-for-profit stewardship of the SFIA framework

Find out more
- Full details of the SFIA ecosystem.