Thursday, January 08, 2009

Occupational Skills Profile Model

The Occupational Skills Profile Model (OSPM) from the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) is an attempt to standardise skills and occupations in the Canadian ICT sector. It is similar to the UK's Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). Unfortunately like SFIA, OSPM suffers from being a proprietary system which requires payment of a fee to use. It also suffers from excessively large and complicated documents. "Occupational Skills Profile Model: A Foundation for the Future" is 544 pages (10.6 Mbytes) of PDF. ICT is a global business and it seems unlikely there is much difference between the jobs in the UK, Canada or anywhere else. Those doing OSPM and SFIA need to pool their resources and provide something we can all use in a format we can use.
The Occupational Skills Profile Model (OSPM) was developed by the Software Human Resource Council (SHRC) to standardize skills and occupations in the Canadian ICT sector, the public sector and educational institutions. It is the foundation for identifying, recruiting, retaining and retraining workers, and is recognized as the national standard for describing ICT occupations in Canada. ...

The 36 current occupational profiles defined by the OSPM include software and hardware occupations to be compared across industries and over time, and give employers the ability to target and address skills gaps within their organizations.

... skills are grouped into five areas:

• Technical/Functional Skills
• Business and Management Skills
• Personal/Interpersonal Skills
• Software/IT Environments
• Hardware Environments ...

From: "Occupational Skills Profile Model: A Foundation for the Future" , Reference Manual Version 3.0, Information and Communications Technology Council Inc., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 2007

ps: The ACS uses SFIA for its courses and I had to come to grisps with it for the Green ICT course.

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