Published: July 2026 · 6 min read
Picture a CV from a Royal Signals warrant officer with nineteen years of service. Somewhere in it sits deep experience in network architecture, incident response under conditions most civilian engineers will never face, and the kind of judgement you only get from being responsible when things go wrong at 3am. A recruiter opens it, scans for the keywords their client gave them, finds none of them, and closes it.
That candidate was not unqualified. They were untranslated.
Two frameworks, one wall between them
The civilian technology world describes skills through SFIA, the Skills Framework for the Information Age. It defines 147 skills across eight categories, each measured on a seven-level scale that runs from routine supervised work up to setting strategy. It has been the standard for decades. Employers write role profiles in it. Government departments procure against it.
Defence has its own answer: the Pan-Defence Skills Framework, the MoD's tri-service standard covering 39 specialist skills across data, digital and technology. It is newer, and it is good. For the first time, a Navy engineer and an RAF cyber operator can be described in the same terms, by ability rather than rank.
Here is the detail that matters. Both frameworks measure proficiency on a seven-level scale, and the scales measure the same underlying thing: the scope of your judgement and responsibility. The skill categories differ. The terminology differs. The levels do not.
Which means translation between the two is not just possible. It is precise. A PDSF assessment can be read across into SFIA terms with real fidelity, if you know both frameworks well enough to do it.
Almost nobody does.
We went looking for the competition
Before writing this piece, we did the research we would do for any client: who else in UK recruitment is working this way?
The honest answer is that we could not find anyone. SFIA is used seriously by employers, by consultancies, by HR software vendors who sell skills-mapping tools to internal teams. But among recruitment firms, the agencies actually deciding which CVs reach a hiring manager, we found no one assessing candidates against SFIA levels. And we found no recruitment firm anywhere that references PDSF at all. The framework is still treated as internal MoD machinery, not as the key it actually is.
The nearest thing to an exception is WithYouWithMe, a veteran-founded training platform and a genuine force for good, which holds an SFIA licence and helps service leavers build new skills. But they are a software and upskilling company. They are not a search firm, and skills translation between the defence and civilian frameworks is not what they do.
So the state of the market is this. The two standards that could connect defence talent to civilian demand both exist, both are mature enough to use, and the industry paid to make that connection is using neither.
What happens instead
What happens instead is keyword matching, dressed up in different outfits.
An applicant tracking system checks a military CV for the phrases in a civilian job spec, and finds few, because service leavers were never taught to write in that dialect. A recruiter with defence experience does the translation in their head, differently on Tuesday than on Thursday, differently from their colleague at the next desk. The ex-military agencies, and there are some decent ones, trade on network and goodwill: they know the hiring managers who “get” veterans, and they make introductions. Valuable, but it is relationship work, not assessment. Nobody can tell the client, in the client's own language, what the candidate can actually do and at what level.
The consequences fall in a predictable place. Every year thousands of people leave the forces with exactly the capabilities the cyber and defence tech sector says it is desperate for. The same sector then filters a large share of them out at the first screen, because the evidence of those capabilities is written in the wrong vocabulary. As we said in an earlier piece, you cannot credibly complain about a shortage while you are filtering out the supply.
Fluency is not a feature
There is a reason recruitment firms have not done this, and it is worth being honest about it. Framework fluency is expensive. SFIA is a serious document; PDSF is another one; holding both in your head and applying them consistently to real CVs is slow, skilled work. The traditional agency model runs on speed and volume. Slow, skilled work is precisely what the model punishes.
So the gap is not an oversight. It is a structural outcome. The industry is shaped to avoid exactly the work that would solve its loudest complaint.
So we built it into the platform
This is where we stop describing the problem and declare an interest, because translation between these two frameworks is the foundation TriTech Search is built on.
Every candidate we assess is scored against both SFIA and PDSF at the same time, using that shared seven-level scale as the bridge. Personal information comes out before assessment happens, so the scoring sees evidence, and nothing else. Role briefs are scoped in framework terms too, which means matching becomes a comparison of like with like rather than a keyword lottery.
And where the evidence is thin, we say so. Each skill score carries a confidence level, and we would rather show partial confidence on a skill than manufacture false certainty. A hiring manager can work with “level 5, moderate confidence”. What they cannot work with is a keyword match pretending to be an assessment.
None of this is magic. Both frameworks are publicly available, and the seven-level scale is sitting there waiting to be used by anyone willing to do the work. As far as we can tell, in UK recruitment, we are currently the only ones who have. We would honestly prefer more company; the candidates deserve an industry that can read them.
The translation, at least, is solved
Until then, if you are hiring into cyber or defence technology, or leaving the forces and wondering why your applications disappear into silence, the explanation is probably not your capability. It is the translation. That part, at least, is now solved.