Someone Will Sell You a Skills Framework. You Might Not Need to Buy One.

Sooner or later, every L&D function encounters the competency framework conversation. It tends to arrive in one of two forms. Either a consultancy proposes one as part of a broader engagement, beautifully branded, pleasingly comprehensive, and priced accordingly; or someone senior has attended a conference, returned full of conviction about capability maturity, and would like to know why the organisation does not have a framework yet. Both scenarios end in the same place: somebody has to decide whether to buy, commission, or build something, and nobody is entirely sure what it should contain.

The framework itself is rarely the problem. Knowing which skills your digital and technology teams need, at which level of proficiency, and how those skills connect to the training and development available to them, is genuinely useful information. It makes L&D investment easier to justify, career progression easier to define, and capability gaps easier to identify before they become operational problems. The difficulty is getting there without spending most of the year doing it.

The consultancy route

The management consulting approach to skills frameworks tends to involve a discovery phase, a workshop series, a proprietary methodology, a delivery phase, a presentation of findings, and a set of materials that will need updating in eighteen months when the methodology is revised. The larger consultancies, the ones with names that appear on the sides of buildings in Canary Wharf, have all published extensively on skills-based organisations and the imperative of moving beyond traditional job descriptions. Deloitte, for instance, has been quite vocal on the subject. This is admirable. It is also, not entirely coincidentally, the same territory in which they offer consulting services.

The cost of commissioning a bespoke competency framework through a significant consultancy is not often published, because the answer depends on scope and scope tends to expand during discovery. What is fairly consistent is that it is not small, and that the output is a framework which belongs to the engagement, is calibrated to the consulting firm's own taxonomy, and is not easily portable should the organisation later decide to go a different direction. You have bought a very thorough piece of work that is also, in a quiet way, somewhat proprietary.

The build-your-own temptation

The alternative, which usually presents itself around the point when someone has seen the quotes, is to build one internally. How hard can it be, the thinking goes; we know our roles, we know what good looks like, we will simply write it down and organise it into levels. This is not wrong as far as it goes, but it turns out that "writing it down and organising it into levels" for a technology function of any size is a project that takes considerably longer than the initial optimism suggests, requires someone with genuine expertise in competency framework design to avoid producing something that collapses under scrutiny, and will need to be maintained indefinitely as roles, tools, and practices evolve.

In our experience, the internal build route tends to produce one of two things: either a framework that is genuinely good and has absorbed a disproportionate amount of skilled people's time to create, or a document that was good at the time of writing, has not been updated, and is quietly not being used by anyone. Neither outcome is quite what was intended at the outset.

The framework that already exists

This is the point at which it is worth mentioning SFIA. The Skills Framework for the Information Age is a globally adopted reference model for describing and measuring the skills and competencies of technology, digital and agile professionals. It has been in active development for over twenty years, is maintained by a not-for-profit foundation, has been adopted in almost 200 countries, and covers 121 skills organised across seven clearly defined levels of responsibility. It is also, for most organisations using it for internal staff management purposes, free.

That last point bears repeating, because it is the one that tends to produce a slightly suspicious silence when first mentioned. An internationally recognised, rigorously maintained, vendor-neutral skills framework, used by governments, armed forces, large enterprises and universities around the world, available without charge for internal use. It exists. It has been there for some time. Nobody is particularly trying to sell it to you, which may be why it is not always the first thing that comes up in the conversation.

Who is using it

The SFIA user stories are, in their way, quietly persuasive. Arnold Clark, the UK's largest independent car retailer, implemented what they called Arnold Clark Digital Careers using SFIA as the underpinning framework, bringing, in their words, clarity and consistency to digital career progression across the business. They branded the initiative AC/DC, which suggests someone in their digital team has a sense of humour, and also that the framework was sufficiently flexible to be made entirely their own.

The Royal Air Force has used SFIA to build a career framework for its Cyberspace Profession, mapping knowledge, skills, experience and behaviours for a function that did not exist in its current form a decade ago. The British Army's Royal Corps of Signals has used it for similar purposes. The Australian Public Service used it as the basis for developing frameworks and tools for managing digital capability across the federal government. The University of Auckland mapped over 330 roles with SFIA and used it to align a training programme and establish a skills inventory. risual, a UK technology services company, went further still, making SFIA part of daily organisational life, using it for job descriptions, recruitment, performance reviews and personal development planning.

These are not experimental pilots. They are organisations that had a real problem, found SFIA to be the appropriate tool, and applied it. The scale and variety of that list is itself a kind of quality assurance that no bespoke consultancy framework can easily replicate.

What SFIA actually looks like in practice

SFIA organises skills into categories, and defines each skill at the levels where it is meaningful, rather than artificially at all seven. This is a more honest approach than it might sound: not every skill has a meaningful expression at Level 1 or Level 7, and the framework does not pretend otherwise. The seven levels run from Follow at Level 1 through to Set Strategy at Level 7, covering the full range from someone new to a role through to the kind of person whose job title includes the word "Chief".

For agile roles specifically, SFIA 9 includes a dedicated Agile Skills view, identifying the skills most relevant to people working in agile delivery environments. The Scrum Master profile, for instance, draws on skills across four groups: core practice, coaching and people development, strategic and organisational capability, and delivery. Each skill has a defined descriptor at each relevant level, making it possible to look at a specific practitioner or team and understand not just whether they have a skill, but how developed that skill actually is, and what a meaningful next step would look like.

This is the part that makes SFIA genuinely useful for L&D, as opposed to merely interesting. Once you know which skills a role requires at which levels, you can map your training investment directly to those targets. Gaps become visible. Course choices become defensible. The conversation with a sceptical finance team about why the training budget needs to be what it is becomes considerably more straightforward when the answer is grounded in a recognised international framework rather than professional instinct, however well-founded that instinct might be.

What we have built with it

We have been doing this work for a while, and SFIA has become a useful part of how we think about training design for corporate clients. As a concrete worked example, we have built out the Scrum Master role profile in SFIA 9 in full. This covers the six core professional skills the role requires, each defined at the appropriate level of responsibility: Organisational Change Enablement (OCEN) and Organisational Facilitation (OFCL) at Level 4, Methods and Tools (METL), Stakeholder Relationship Management (RLMT) and Learning Delivery (ETDL) at Level 4, and Measurement (MEAS) at Level 3. Each skill card shows the SFIA descriptor, what it means in the Scrum Master context specifically, and the training courses that address it.

Beyond the core skills, the profile covers technologies and methods on SFIA's separate four-point proficiency scale, from Awareness through to Expert, and maps all twelve SFIA behavioural factors to the role, noting which three matter most and why. A final section pulls everything together into a training mapping table, showing which AgilityPro courses develop which elements of the profile and at what level.

It is not the framework itself that does the work, of course. The framework provides the structure; the work is in understanding how the skills defined in an international standard connect to the real, imperfect, occasionally bewildering context of a specific organisation. But the starting point does not have to be an expensive engagement or a multi-month internal project. It can be a framework that already exists, is free to use, and has been tested at rather impressive scale.

If your organisation is using SFIA or thinking about it, or if you are trying to connect agile training investment to a competency framework and would like to see how the mapping works in practice, the Scrum Master profile is a reasonable place to start.