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e-skills UK, BCS, IEE and IMIS join forces to form the SFIA foundation

New initiative to establish SFIA as the industry standard and drive IT skills development

e-skills UK, the Sector Skills Council for IT, Telecoms and Contact Centres, the British Computer Society (BCS), the IEE and the Institute for the Management of Information Systems (IMIS) today announced that they have joined forces to form the SFIA Foundation. The Foundation will work to further develop SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) and encourage and support its use within organisations. The Foundation will provide the framework free of charge to end-user organisations, and will license it to providers of software and services who wish to base their offerings on SFIA.

The Foundation's objectivers are to own, promote, develop and maintain SFIA and to encourage its adoption and use. SFIA provides a common reference model for the identification of the skills needed by organisations to develop effective IT and Telecommunications systems. It is a simple two-dimensional framework consisting of areas of work on one axis and levels of responsibility on the other. This framework provides an agreed classification of the types of professional capability that exist in IT and Telecomms and the skills that underpin them (SFIA describes people's professional identities, not necessarily what their jobs are called).

SFIA enables the measurement and benchmarking of an organisation's IT and Telecoms skills and its processes for managing and developing these. It can be used to identify the people with the rights skills for projects and assignments and provides a framework within which skills development and training can take place.

The Institutional members have nominated Malcolm Sillars (BCS), Dorrie Giles (IEE), Ian Rickwood (IMIS) and Terry Watts (e-skills UK) to the board of the SFIA Foundation. Ron McLaren has been appointed Operations Manager of the Foundation. One of the driving forces for SFIA will be the Steering Group, whose first meeting took place on July 2nd at the IEE. Its members are drawn from SFIA's user community and includes Accenture, CISCO, DTI, IBM, the Irish Computer Society, Learning Tree, Ministry of Defence, Norwich Union, Parity Training and QA Training.

Ron McLaren, Operations Manager of the SFIA Foundation said: "This is a significant day for SFIA. Establishing the Foundation and forming a Steering Group of influential users gives new impetus to SFIA and will help us to get the message across to IT employers. Having the right skills framework is key to the development of their vital skills asset. It's a running-the-company issue, not just a training tool."

Terry Watts, Chief Operations Officer, e-skills UK said: "e-skills has developed SFIA with input form industry at every stage. The SFIA Foundation will now be able to take this further and ensure that the framework is used to develop skills on a continuous basis to the benefit of employees and employers. In the IT sector on-the-job learning is so crucial, employers can use the framework not just to ensure that they find the right people for their projects, but the right projects for their people."

Ian Rickwood, Chief Executive, IMIS said: "Our whole assessment system for members is based on SFIA. I expect that many employers will want to adopt SFIA, using it as the basis for role definitions and for the assessment of their own IT staff."

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