This blog post presents the Arm KSA Framework. The framework, recently published on GitHub, aligns with renewed government, industry, and educational institutions’ interest in workforce development in the semiconductor sector, and the opportunities and challenges presented by AI.
Governments ask this question to inform policies around workforce development. At a time when several national and regional governments are implementing semiconductor strategies, which aim to onshore new capabilities (such as chip manufacturing), the question has never been more relevant. The rise of AI is also disrupting the nature of work with the displacement of many job roles and the creation of many new ones.
Arm has developed a response to the question. The Arm KSA Framework is a systematic view of the knowledge, skills and abilities displayed by roles in the semiconductor industry, starting with entry-level software and hardware engineers.
KSA Frameworks are sometimes called competency frameworks. Such frameworks identify the competencies required for a particular role or group of roles:
The Education team at Arm, along with contributions from 100+ Arm engineers and consultation with external stakeholders, has developed a competency framework. This framework is a comprehensive super-set of the KSAs that early career software or hardware engineers bring to the industry. The framework is structured in four strands:
These strands unpack into a total of over 750 statements.
Development work on the KSA Framework began with intensive research into the current understanding of the skills and knowledge used by entry-level software and hardware engineers. This included academic and industry research and models, resulting in a draft structure and initial content.
Following the design of this draft, multiple rounds of consultations were carried out with software and hardware engineers in a variety of specialisms. Over 100 Arm engineers provided feedback. The structure and content of the Framework were adapted accordingly. To ensure the Framework reflected a variety of relevant perspectives, consultees included senior engineers, hiring managers, graduates and interns. They also included members of Employee Resource Groups focused on issues connected with diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as engineers who had experienced school and higher education in countries outside Europe and North America.
The central questions addressed in consultations were: does the Framework capture the knowledge, skills and abilities that are valuable to entry-level engineers? If not, what’s missing? How can it be changed or augmented to match your expectations and experiences? Throughout each consultation, feedback was recorded on elements of the Framework (see below for an explanation of its structure):
Additional information, including the programming languages currently used in connection with a particular skill
The Framework represents the sum total of the research, consultation and iterative development work described above. One would not expect a single engineer is not expected to be proficient in all the KSAs. Instead, the Framework represents a super-set of skills and knowledge for entry-level engineers across software and hardware specialisms.
Figure 1: The Framework represents a super-set of skills and knowledge for entry-level engineers across software and hardware specialisms
It can help to visualize the framework as a tree diagram. The framework is a nested hierarchy built around four strands. Each strand expands to either four or five levels. Each new level breaks down the previous level into a greater level of detail or ‘granularity’.
1 Informed by CC2020 Task Force. (2020). Computing Curricula 2020: Paradigms for Global Computing Education. ACM. 2 Current sub-strand, software engineering, significantly informed by IEEE. (2014). Software Engineering Competency Model v1.0. Figure 2: The KSA Framework Structure
Another feature of the Framework is Additional Fields. This includes examples of the tools, platforms, programming languages, methodologies and techniques which are applied by entry level engineers in the context of a specific skill or knowledge area. Separating this detail enables the KSAs to be presented at a level of abstraction that focuses on principles rather than their current implementations, which can change over short time frames and between specialisms.
Figure 2: Examples of knowledge statements and skills descriptors from the Arm KSA Framework
The Framework is presented in a Microsoft Excel workbook. The workbook contains ten worksheets.
Although Strand 4 is separated into hardware and software skills, this does not imply that an engineer working in, for example, a hardware specialism would only apply skills from the hardware sub-strand. No engineering role would rely solely on content from one of the sub-strands.
The KSA framework is focused on technical roles, rather than leadership or management career pathways. This means it complements other frameworks. The KSA framework is adaptable. If new KSAs are identified that are not represented in the framework, they can be added in consultation with communities of engineers. This open process ensures that the language used to describe a KSA meets the needs of as many different engineering specialisms as possible. The outcome is a common language to describe KSAs across an organization, and broader industry. The process also ensures that education and training interventions (built on top of KSA frameworks) are developed and implemented quickly to meet emerging job market needs.
The Framework has been published under an End User License Agreement which enables other organisations to use the Framework and create their own versions, subject to licensing terms. Driven by our Semiconductor Education Alliance, the Framework provides a foundation for developing a common understanding of the competencies required across the semiconductor sector.
When approaching constructing a version of the Arm KSA Framework consider the following questions:
In our next blog post, Arm KSA Framework: theory and applications, we will explore how the Framework can help optimize learning experiences for workplace and educational applications.