IT skills framework gets users' support

An industry-wide IT skills framework that will create single standard job and skills definitions to help UK employers tackle the skills gap has been officially launched today.

The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) claims it will make it simpler for businesses to plan future IT skills recruitment and training by matching their employees' skills to specific IT projects within the company by using a standardised matrix of job titles and functions from entry to management level.

Norwich Union is one of the early adopters of SFIA, using it for 1,700 IT staff across five sites in its life and pensions unit.

Gary Cannon from Norwich Union said the framework has improved consistency of IT job descriptions across the business, aided future planning and reduce inefficiencies.

"We now have a consistent way of describing what we do. We can define and measure skills and identify skills gaps," he said.

The company measures the amount of time its staff are "unallocated" at work and Cannon said the number of hours IT staff are unallocated has fallen 98 per cent since the introduction of SFIA.

But some concerns remain that the new framework could conflict with existing standards from the British Computer Society (BCS) and e-Skills and confuse user organisations.

Kate Edwin-Scott, from the business development unit of the BCS, said it is to align its own Industry Structure Model of skills with the SFIA framework. But she revealed that the BCS currently has no plans to actually drop ISM.

"We've sold 1,300 copies of ISM and we certainly wouldn't want to withdraw it. There is a market for that finer level of detail that ISM provides. It is perceived as a competitor but it isn't. By aligning the two [models] we will remove the confusion out there. BCS will be involved in the promotion of SFIA as the industry standard," she said.

SFIA was formed in July this year by e-skills UK, the BCS, the Institute for the Management of Information Systems and the Institution of Electrical Engineers.