SFIA 9

Skills Framework for the Information Age

workforce
global
Published

May 8, 2026

At a glance

Steward SFIA Foundation
Canonical page SFIA Foundation
Version 9
Released 2024-10
Source format PDF, XLSX, JSON, and RDF distributions. cybedtools reads a third-party SQLite extract of SFIA 9, which carries full skill descriptions, guidance notes, and per-level descriptors alongside the structure
License All use of SFIA is under license from the SFIA Foundation, and the protected material is the concept, content, and structure of SFIA. Free tiers cover personal use and single-country corporate internal use. Redistribution and sub-licensing are prohibited at every tier
framework_summary slug sfia-9

Structure in cybed: terms

SFIA 9 structural mapping Frameworksfia:FrameworkSkill(skills, not roles)sfia:Skill= cybed:OrganizingUnit(no cybed:Role)Level descriptorsfia:LevelDescriptor= cybed:RoleElementcontainscybed:hasOrganizingUnithas elementcybed:hasElement
SFIA enumerates skills, not roles. Click any box or edge label to flip between plain English and the technical schema name.

Counts

Table 1
Measure Value
Skills 147
Strict elements 672
Subpoints (parsed enumeration lists) 149
With-examples elements 821
Elements per skill, strict 4.6
Elements per skill, with-examples 5.6

The elements counted here are level descriptors (one per skill-level pairing where the skill is defined at that level). SFIA’s 7-level scale of responsibility (levels 1 through 7 in the ingested data) defines the scale itself. Those level definitions are part of the framework’s overall structure but are not counted as per-skill elements.

Provenance

Source

cybedtools does not read the SFIA Foundation’s published files. It reads a third-party SQLite extract of SFIA 9, and that extract is not structure only. It carries full skill descriptions, guidance notes, and per-level descriptors, and that text reaches the local graph. None of it is published here.

Ingestion

scripts/010-ingest-sfia.R parses the structure into the cybed schema.

License

All use of SFIA is under license from the SFIA Foundation, and that license reaches structure as well as text. SFIA use in cybedtools is local analysis only. This site shows SFIA skill names and aggregate counts, and nothing more. A permission request to the SFIA Foundation is being prepared.

Caveats

  • SFIA enumerates skills and proficiency levels, not roles. Cross-framework analyses should not equate sfia:Skill with nice:WorkRole or dcwf:WorkRole without explicit justification.
  • Level descriptors only make sense relative to SFIA’s 7-point level scale. Cross-framework comparisons of “elements per organizing unit” reflect that scale, not absolute specificity.
  • The SFIA license covers structure as well as text. The SFIA Foundation’s terms define the protected material as the concept, content, and structure of SFIA, and they name a skills database containing SFIA information as a royalty-bearing product. There is no structure-versus-text carve-out. Free tiers cover personal use and single-country corporate internal use. Redistribution and sub-licensing are prohibited at every tier. Anyone staging SFIA to run this pipeline needs a license of their own, and researchers extending cybedtools with downstream publications should verify their use case against the current terms.
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