Our TOP 5 SFIA hacks

The Problem

You heard that the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) is an excellent framework for digital skills management, and it all seems to make a lot of sense, so you decided to take it on board. BUT you are NOT seeing the promised benefits or ROI. Or, maybe you are still deciding and want to ensure you realise benefits.

 

Realise benefits with SFIAWell, we have been using SFIA to help organisations and individuals realise the benefits and ROI, and make better informed decisions for years. In fact, collectively, as a leadership group, we’ve been using SFIA for the 20+ years that it’s been available, and helping others to get value from it.  The following is a quote from one of our customers:

 

Improve ROI from L&D Budget

“Using SFIA/SkillsTX, we have identified skills and levels of responsibility common to all of our Information Technology Department staff, and then the essential skills required for each individual job.  This has helped us to identify gaps and areas for further training and improvement.  Additionally, we’ve used SkillsTX to revamp our job descriptions throughout the department which has been invaluable in recruitment and retention.” – Ira Cohen, Business Systems Manager, City of Arvada

 

However, you do not gain that much experience without seeing a few mistakes along the way and learning from them. Recently we created the SFIA ‘foundation’ accredited training that allows students to gain a Digital Credential/Badge from the SFIA Foundation to confirm their SFIA knowledge, and this is already proving very popular. This training covers some of the Dos and Don’ts to consider when adopting and implementing SFIA, particularly within your organisation.

Because not everyone is ready to dive in to training, (although our FREE 45-minute SFIA Implementation Guidance will ONLY cost your time), I’ve put together 5 of our top hacks to help you benefit from our learnings:

TOP 5 SFIA Hacks

1 – ALWAYS document all the current skills (and all relevant levels of each skill) of individuals and NOT just the subset of skills they use in their current role or Job.Top 5 SFIA hacks

    • WHY? Simple, we all acquire skills through our unique experiences not just our current role. As skill requirements of roles/jobs change regularly (Gartner say at least 10% year-on-year), we should already know whether someone has those new/changed skills without having to assess them again against the updated role/job profile. Knowing a person’s complete skill profile could reveal skills we never knew they had, reducing the need to recruit and providing an employee with more opportunity.
    • The guidance on assessment from the SFIA Foundation notes “A single level number for a skill does not imply that you have skills to perform all the activities described in lower levels. If that is important for the purpose of the self-assessment you should also assess against all the relevant lower levels.”

2 – DO offer more than a binary choice of skills at levels when documenting a skill profile.

    • WHY? It is crazy to think we go from not having skill to suddenly we’re 100% or an expert. We all have skills that are ‘in progress’ or skills we haven’t used for a while that are rusty. Limiting to ‘you do’ or ‘you don’t’ have a skill is misleading and downright uncomfortable when documenting your skills.

3 – EMPOWER your workforce, ensure they understand that their skills belong to them.

    • WHY? Search #weownourskills in LinkedIn for some useful articles. Many hierarchic structures fall into the trap that someone ‘higher up’ decides whether someone has a skill or not. There is NO doubt that leadership play a role, but it should be collaboration and dialog that confirms an accurate skill profile not an override button, because that would send completely the wrong message to the workforce.

4 – LEVERAGE from the bodies of knowledge around SFIA that already exist.

    • WHY? Because communities, industry bodies and Governments have invested thousands of hours doing the heavy lifting, particularly with regard to mapping SFIA to jobs/pathways/roles. There are over 450 roles already mapped to SFIA and these make an excellent starting point if you’re defining SFIA based roles. It will probably need some adapting but hey, the old 80/20 is still valid.

5 – SFIA falls short (wow, I really just said that and we’re huge SFIA fans) because it does not address technology. So, recognise this, but don’t dismiss SFIA because it’s agnostic.

    • WHY? In the real world we always (well usually) need to know more than SFIA provides. SFIA will provide us with some of the most precise and descriptive skill definitions, but knowing we have someone with Programming at level 4 doesn’t help that much if we’re looking for a COBOL (yes, it’s still out there) programmer. We need this extra detail for practicality in a work environment. There are many examples, Cisco network specialists, S4/Hana specialists etc. Just consider this an extra layer of information that you add to professional skills. See the world like this: ‘Programming level 4 with Java’ Rather than ‘a Java programmer’, they look similar but are NOT equal.

We could have gone for top 10 or even top 50, but that level of detail is best left to formal training. However, we hope the top 5 will help you learn from our lessons.

Expected Digital Skill Management Benefits

Whether you use or are thinking of using SFIA to help manage your own career development or use it in the context of your organisation there is a lot to like. An industry driven, consistent, comprehensive, well defined, and practical framework. Really the only choice you must make is whether to adopt it…or is it? Please feel free use the hacks above to plan your implementation. We’re also happy to jump a short call to discuss your specific situation: Book HERE.

Some benefits you should expect to see following a good implementation include:

  • Improved employee engagement and retention
  • Reduced business risk by knowing your actual skill gaps
  • Better Learning and Development ROI by targeting your budget towards skill gaps
  • More informed decision-making around 4 KEY HR workforce planning options:
    • What skills do you Build within the existing workforce? (always a good starting point)
    • What skills do you Buy (recruitment) and get more accurate and efficient short-listing?
    • What skills do you Borrow (contract in) and ensure that there’s knowledge transfer?
    • What skills can you Mobilise (moving skills within the organisation) to also improve employee engagement?

If you want to see what the above looks like when embedded in a solution, we now offer access to your own sample user with an interactive guided tour. Just register here and we’ll let you know when your sample user is ready with access instructions.

As always you can also create your own ‘real’ http://personal.skillstx.com.