BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is the professional body for computing, digital and IT professionals. With over 60,000 members in 150 countries, we’re on a mission to ensure everyone’s experience with technology is positive and that the potential benefits of technology are realised for the whole of society.

Our partnership and work with the SFIA foundation is pivotal towards delivering against these aims, with the framework forming the basis against which we build our qualifications, apprenticeships and assess our registrations and standards against.

We work with organisations of all sizes to help them develop their staff through giving access to professional qualifications for their team, delivering accredited apprenticeship programmes and performing skills audits and organisation wide learning capability assessments.

BCS holds a unique position in the tech community enabling us to offer critical insight, impartial guidance and exclusive opportunities for organisations to develop their teams and reach their long-term goals.

https://www.bcs.org/develop-your-people/develop-your-team-or-organisation/

The BCS detailed IT Professional standard is SFIAplus. 

This adds resource pages to all the 102 Skills (covering for example typical tools and techniques) and detailed components for all the 394 Tasks (Skills at a Level).

Namely...

• Typical background describing the combination of education, experience, and prior knowledge and skills that a practitioner needs to possess before starting to perform a particular Task.
• Key Work Activities which describe the typical activities that a practitioner would perform whilst undertaking a Task.
• Related Knowledge and Skills which identifies the most important knowledge and skills the practitioner will require to achieve proficiency in the Task. They cover Behavioural; Technical and Other. The last two are allocated depths of Aware, Familiar, Proficient and Expert.
• Suggested Training Activities, which lead to increased proficiency in the current Role. They are in contrast to PDAs (Professional Development Activities) which are preparation for broader and greater responsibility beyond the current Role. Training activities may be undertaken in a variety of ways, from formal courses and distance learning to on-the-job training and self-study.
• Suggested PDAs covering areas concerned with Broadening Activities, Increasing Knowledge, Participation in Professional Activities and Developing Professional Skills.
• Suggested Qualifications which characterise a particular Task by referring to the qualification(s) which are relevant to that Task and which can provide evidence of proficiency in all or part of that Task - either in the general sense or when the Task is performed in a specific context or using specific methodologies. Only major professional and vocational qualifications which require some form of assessment are referenced. These include both IT and relevant non-IT qualifications (e.g. training and project management) as well as those which are vendor, methodology or product specific..

The BCS was a major partner in creating the SFIA Foundation and SFIA framework. The BCS always had a detailed standard called the ISM (Industry Structure Model) and donated their high-level Skill and Task (Skill at a Level) descriptions to SFIA to form the backbone of the new standard. They then renamed their standard SFIAplus. They also supplied various resources in its early years to ensure its survival.