Where to start with SFIA skills profiling

SFIA skills profiling can be useful at different scales.

• Some people begin within a single team, function or professional area where there is an immediate need for clearer role definitions, recruitment or development paths. 
• Others begin as part of a broader organisational initiative to improve consistency across multiple teams or functions. 
• This page helps you identify your starting point and choose the guidance that best fits your context.

How to use this guidance

If you are new to SFIA skills profiling, a useful reading path is often:

• Where to start with SFIA skills profiling (this page) - to identify the starting point that best fits your context
• Getting started with SFIA skills profiling across teams — to understand the considerations that often matter in a first organisation-wide adoption
• Building SFIA-based skills profiles - to use the practical method for constructing SFIA-based skills profiles
• Using SFIA skills profiles in your team, function or professional area — to put completed profiles to practical use

Readers working within a smaller local scope may prefer to move from this page directly to Building SFIA-based skills profiles and Using SFIA skills profiles in your team, function or professional area, then return later to the broader implementation guidance if their scope expands.

On this page

1. What a skills profile gives you
2. How to start when you intention is for use of SFIA only within a single team, function or professional area
3. How to start when your intention is for broad adoption of SFIA across multiple teams, functions, departments or organisation-wide
4. Moving from local use to broader adoption

What a skills profile gives you

A SFIA skills profile is a structured description of the skills and level of responsibility required in a role. At its simplest, it answers the question: what does good look like in this position?

A well-constructed profile gives a clearer basis for defining roles and supports better conversations about recruitment, development and team design. Used across a wider scope, it also supports consistency in workforce planning and career pathways.

Choose the route that matches your situation.

• If you are working within one team and want to improve role clarity and management decisions, start locally.
• If you need consistency across multiple teams or functions, start with the organisational guidance.

Starting within a single team, function or professional area

If you are a manager who wants to describe your team’s roles more clearly, you can start now with your own team. You do not need wider organisational adoption before profiles become useful.

Local profiling is often the most practical way to begin. It gives you something concrete to use in your own team and, if broader interest develops later, it gives you a sound starting point for wider adoption.

You can begin at team level or organisational level. A manager may choose to start by clarifying roles within their own team, while broader adoption may involve wider organisational sponsorship and coordination.

What you can do immediately

1. Build profiles for the roles in your team using the guidance on Building SFIA-based skills profiles.
2. Once those profiles exist, you can use them to support recruitment, development conversations and thinking about team structure. The detailed guidance on those uses is covered in Using SFIA skills profiles as a local manager.

What you need to get started

• You need a working knowledge of the SFIA framework - specifically the levels of responsibility and how skills are described and levelled. If you have not already done so, familiarise yourself with Foundation level training before building profiles.
• You do need time, familiarity with your team’s roles and the discipline to focus on what the roles require rather than who currently fills them.

What local profiling gives you

• A set of profiles for your own team is immediately useful. It gives you precision and consistency within your team that most managers do not have. It supports better decisions in recruitment, development and team design.
• It also gives you something to build on. If your organisation moves towards broader SFIA adoption - or if you choose to advocate for it - your team's profiles become a reference point and a proof of concept. 

What local profiling does not give you

Profiles built within one team cannot easily be compared with profiles built independently in other teams unless those teams have used the same approach to levelling and skill selection. Cross-team comparison, career pathways that cross team boundaries, and organisation-wide workforce planning all require a degree of consistency across teams that local profiling alone cannot guarantee.

This is not a reason to wait for organisational adoption before starting. It is simply a realistic picture of what a local implementation delivers, and an honest account of where its limits are. Many of the benefits of skills profiling are available at the team level. The additional benefits of consistency across the organisation become available as adoption grows.

A note on sharing your profiles

You may find that colleagues in other teams are interested in the profiles you have built - either because they are facing similar challenges, or because they can see the value of a common language across related roles. This is one of the most natural ways that local adoption grows into something broader. When that happens, the main challenge is no longer whether profiles are useful, but how to apply them consistently across a wider scope.

Starting for broader adoption across multiple teams or functions - adopting SFIA at scale

If your organisation has decided to implement SFIA skills profiling across a business unit, a function or the whole organisation, the task changes in scale. At that point, consistency across teams matters as much as the quality of any individual profile.

A common approach to levelling, calibration across teams, clear ownership and leadership support all become important. The right starting point for that context is Getting started with SFIA skills profiling across teams.

• That guidance covers the disciplines that matter most in a first rollout: keeping profiles focused on roles rather than people, working by job family, calibrating across teams, treating the first pass as a baseline and giving leaders a practical role in keeping the work moving.
• From there, Building SFIA-based skills profiles provides the detailed mechanics for constructing individual profiles.

Moving from local use to broader adoption

Local adoption and organisational adoption are not separate tracks. They are stages on the same journey, and movement between them is natural.

A manager who has used profiles successfully in their own team will often become an advocate for broader adoption. As more teams join in, the value of consistency becomes more visible and the limits of isolated local profiling become easier to see.

The transition from local to organisational does not require starting again. Profiles built carefully at local level are a sound foundation for broader adoption. The additional work is mainly about comparing, aligning and governing profiles across teams rather than rebuilding everything from scratch.

None of these wider considerations should delay a manager from starting with their own team. The best time to begin is when the need is clear and the benefit is immediate. For many managers, that point is now.

Ready to build your first profile? Go to Building SFIA-based skills profiles

Planning an organisational implementation? Go to Getting started with SFIA skills profiling across teams