E-Skills UK, the Sector Skills Council (SSC) for IT, telecoms and contact
centres, has joined forces with major IT-related institutions to establish the
Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) foundation. This will enable
employers of IT professionals to set up a framework for assessing the
professional skills of their IT staff and help to identify people with the
right skills for projects and assignments.
Working with e-Skills in the venture are the British Computer Society, the
Institute for the Management of Information Systems, and the Institute of
Electrical Engineers.
The foundation will provide the framework free of charge to end-user
organisations and will license it to providers of software and services which
want to base their offerings on SFIA.
Its steering group is made up of people from SFIA’s user community and
includes Accenture, Cisco, the Department of Trade and Industry, IBM, Learning
Tree, the Ministry of Defence, Norwich Union, Parity, QA Training and the Irish
Computer Society.
"E-Skills has developed SFIA with input from the industry at every
stage," says Terry Watts, the SSC’s chief operations officer. "The
foundation will now be able to take this further and ensure the framework is
used to develop skills on a continuous basis to benefit employees and
employers.
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"On-the-job learning is crucial to IT. Employers can use the framework
not just to ensure they find the right people for their projects, but the right
projects for their people."
Weblink www.sfia.org.uk
