SFIA newsletter - September 2019

For 20 years the SFIA Foundation has developed and made available the SFIA Framework for organisations to use, to manage and develop the capability of their workforce and for individuals to use to develop their own skills. The SFIA Foundation has also provided high-level guidance on using SFIA and provided a global community and ecosystem to share good practice.

As well as developing the SFIA Framework, the international user base has asked for the high-level guidance to be further developed to provide more information on the use of SFIA for all aspects of human capital development. Through international working groups directed by SFIA Council, the Foundation has responded and the following describes some of this activity.

A high-level context for human capital development is provided here 

This email concerns one area of human capital development, skills assessment. Future emails will introduce the SFIA Foundation’s work on:

• Other areas of human capital development
• Our work on SFIA Views
• Specialisms within the context of SFIA
• International activities and Collaborations such as our mapping to the software engineering body of knowledge with the IEEE-CS and collaborating with ISO/IEC/JTC1 SC7/WG20 for the software and systems engineering profession.

Should you wish not to receive such updates, please do opt out from receiving future emails.

Skills Assessment

The SFIA Foundation has seen increasing demand for guidance on SFIA skills assessment. 

• This demand comes from individuals, employers, professional bodies, educational establishments, national and international bodies.
• They want to use SFIA as the internationally recognised, de-facto standard to assess, benchmark, and recognise the professional skills for ICT, digital and software engineering professionals.

 To support the global SFIA community in addressing this need; we are developing and publishing guidelines for SFIA assessments.

• The guidelines will cover a variety of assessment types – described here.
• The SFIA Foundation has obtained input from a global, collaborative working group of experienced SFIA users.

The first set of detailed guidelines is aimed at self-assessments.

• Self-assessment guidelines have been developed first as it is the starting point for most assessment types. They are available here as both a web page and a downloadable pdf.
• The guidelines are intended to help individuals to perform their own SFIA assessment and also for organisations to establish their preferred approach.

• The published guidelines are illustrative only. They describe alternative approaches and do not mandate a single definitive approach.
• As the guidelines are not prescriptive, some organisations may like to make use the SFIA Accredited Consultant and Partner community

The core SFIA framework is regularly updated through a global open consultation process. But SFIA is more than just the Framework, there is an entire ecosystem supporting it which is why SFIA has become the world’s most widely adopted skills and competency framework. I believe that this and other initiatives demonstrate this and will help to keep SFIA in its leadership position.

Our thanks, as ever, go to those who contributed their thoughts, ideas and experiences with regards to this work.

If you have any questions or ideas and requirements for additional SFIA developments please get in touch.

Kind regards, 

Ian Seward

SFIA Foundation

Email: [email protected]