Professional Skills

Skill construction

SFIA provides a detailed descriptions for more than 120 professional skills. Each professional skill provides a skill description, guidance notes and a description of the skill at each relevant level of responsibility.

• The consistency of the levels of responsibility carries forward into the professional skills.
• A description of a skill at a level is written so that it is consistent with the level of responsibility at that level.

This approach ensures the consistency of the levels throughout the whole framework, making it solid and robust. It also integrates behaviours/behavioural factors and professional skills at a level combining to describe overall responsibility, accountability and impact.

Professional skills and generic attributes work together

The levels of responsibility, and specifically their generic attributes, are used together with the professional skills to describe overall competence. Each skill description comprises an overall definition of the skill, some guidance notes and a description of the skill at each of up to seven levels at which the skill might be exercised. These descriptions provide a detailed definition of what it means to practice the skill at each level of responsibility.