SFIA and PDSF: A Shared Language for Skills
Our platform assesses candidates against both the civilian and the military standard for technical capability, so the two sides of the table can finally compare notes.
Two frameworks, one shared structure
SFIA (the Skills Framework for the Information Age) is the global standard for digital and technology capability, widely adopted across UK public and private sector employers. It defines 147 skills across eight categories, each rated on a scale of seven levels of responsibility, from close supervision to setting organisational direction.
PDSF (the Pan-Defence Skills Framework) is the Ministry of Defence’s tri-service standard for digital and data roles. It defines 39 specialist skills across data, digital, and technology categories, rated on the same seven-level structure.
Both frameworks describe the same underlying idea on the same seven-point scale: how far a person’s judgement and responsibility extend, from routine tasks performed under supervision through to setting strategy. That shared shape is what lets us put a civilian skills profile and a military skills profile side by side.
The seven-level scale
| Level | SFIA | PDSF |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Follow | Awareness |
| 2 | Assist | Foundation |
| 3 | Apply | Working / Junior Practitioner |
| 4 | Enable | Practitioner |
| 5 | Ensure & Advise | Experienced Practitioner |
| 6 | Initiate & Influence | Expert |
| 7 | Set Strategy | Strategist |
Skill categories and terminology differ between the two frameworks. The seven-level proficiency scale does not.
Why this matters
A candidate leaving the armed forces has a skills record built entirely in PDSF terms. Most civilian employers have never heard of PDSF and have no reliable way to compare it against the SFIA-defined requirements in their own role briefs.
That gap is not a paperwork problem. It is a capability translation problem, and it is one of the reasons strong ex-forces candidates get filtered out of civilian technical roles for reasons that have nothing to do with what they can actually do.
We built our platform to close that gap directly, rather than asking a consultant to translate it by hand, inconsistently, every time.
How it works
When a candidate’s CV is uploaded to the platform, personal information is removed before the skills assessment runs. What goes into the assessment is capability, not a name, a school, or a former employer’s logo.
We score the CV against both frameworks in a single pass, producing a level and a confidence score for each relevant skill, in both SFIA and PDSF terms, from the same underlying evidence. A candidate’s programming experience, for example, returns a level and a confidence score under SFIA’s programming skill and under PDSF’s equivalent skill code at the same time.
The confidence score is deliberate. We would rather show partial confidence on a skill than manufacture false certainty. Consultants use that score, not just the level, when they make a judgement call on a shortlist.
The result feeds straight into matching. A role brief scoped in SFIA terms can be matched against candidates whose experience sits in PDSF terms, and the reverse, without anyone doing the translation by hand.
What this is not
TriTech Search is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the Ministry of Defence, the SFIA Foundation, or any government body. SFIA is a framework maintained by the SFIA Foundation. PDSF is a Ministry of Defence framework. We use both as public reference frameworks for skills assessment; the scoring methodology and matching logic described on this page are our own.
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