Beyond implementation: Ensuring long-term success with SFIA

• Thanks to everyone who joined us for SFIA Week 2024!
• You can view a replay of the session video, download the slides, and review the session Q&A below.
• We encourage you to explore the SFIA NZ site in more detail as it contains a wealth of knowledge and resources on digital skill and capability that could be beneficial to your learning journey.
• If you’d like to talk to us to about the benefits of SFIA for your organisation, or would like more info on our SFIA training and recruitment support services, please email us at hello@digitalskillsagency.com.

Video - replay session

Download slides

You can download our slides from this session via the link here. 

The link is also at the bottom of the page.

Q&A

1. Question: 
   • What can you advise or suggest if we had a really good project implementation (i.e. good job design, good buy-in from stakeholders, etc) but the issue starts to come in at the skill assessment stage where data is widely inaccurate, users are not maintaining their profiles due to time constraints, etc?
   • Answer: 
     • There are a few different challenges here:
       
       • Assessment quality:
         • Assessing consistently across a group of staff and different assessors and gaining buy-in is not an easy task. This is definitely an area where we would suggest getting some help at first and then build your own assessment capability over time. A couple of pointers:
         • Scope: To start with the scope and purpose of the assessment needs to be agreed and communicated, e.g. are you looking at all current skills of the participants (regardless of current role), just the skills relevant for the current role, or any skills used in a time window (regardless of role), or something else? Are you looking for very high-quality data immediately or a good starting point that can be improve don incrementally? The scope opf coruse fits in with the 'why' - why are you doing this and what's in it for staff?
         • Assessors/moderators: Self-assessments are typically pretty unreliable at first, so some form of assessor/moderator is needed to improve the quality and provide feedback to participants. How this works, and who plays the role of assessor/moderator, and the evidence needed should be tailored to the scope.
         • Appeals/corrections: What happens when someone disagrees with their profile? Is there an appeals process (who does this go to)?
         • Comms comms comms: The whole process needs to be communicated to all participants clearly to set expectations and gain alignment. We typically include staff briefings, team leader briefings, and online resources.
       • Users not maintaining their profile:
         • Usually when we see this, it's because there is no clear reason for them to do so, or it falls into the 'too hard' basket. We need a system that encourages staff to keep this data current and ideally you want to be able to track this.

• • Are line managers and staff using this in their development conversations?
  • Do staff know how to make small changes to their profile (and provide the necessary evidence to support the change if there is an approval process?)
  • Can your tool provide some indication of when staff most recently looked at or updated their profile? (Both to the line manager and implementation owner.)

1. • • • We have some well-tested patterns for the above at the Digital Skills Agency - feel free to get in touch for a quick call for some more targeted advice - hello@digitalskillsagency.com. 
2. Question: 
   • Any recommended tools to support the process?
   • Answer:
     • SkillsTx is a great tool for managing profiles at individual, team and organisational level and they have resources to support existing users transitioning to SFIA 9 from earlier versions. A quality change management plan is also helpful - consult with your internal change specialists for support.