Overview For Employers

The Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework can help you as an employer:

• decide if an applicant's qualifications are at the right level for the job
• plan training and development programmes by showing the range of qualifications available and the way that your employees can progress through different routes to learning
• avoid costly training mistakes by giving you a simple reference to check the SCQF Level and credit value of a training package and how it compares to others. At present, the Framework is only for Scottish qualifications, but soon it will link to UK and European frameworks
• gain credit for your own in-house training packages. Our aim is to include all forms of learning in the Framework that have been quality assured. In this way, all learning in Scotland can be given a level and a credit rating

There are more qualifications available to learners today than ever before. People are being encouraged to gain knowledge and skills all through their lives.

As an employer, you will come across many different kinds of qualifications on CVs. You also have more opportunities than ever before to encourage employees to improve and develop their skills.

The Framework has been developed to help you to understand what the different qualifications are and how they compare with one another.

The Framework has 12 Levels ranging from National Qualifications from Access at Level 1 up to Doctorates at Level 12.It includes different qualifications at the same level. This does not mean that the qualifications are the same. They may differ in subject content and may have different methods of assessment. Qualifications or programmes of learning positioned at the same level are broadly comparable in terms of the general level of outcome. Thus when benchmarked against the SCQF level descriptors they have been deemed to be equally demanding.

SCQF Credit Points are a way of showing how much time it takes on average to successfully complete a qualification or learning programme. In common with other credit systems, the SCQF works on the basis that one credit point represents the amount of learning achieved through a notional 10 hours of learning time. That's why some qualifications - even at the same level - have more credit points than others. For example, an Advanced Higher and an HNC both sit at SCQF Level 7. However, the Advanced Higher course has 32 credit points and the HNC has 96. This means that it takes on average 320 hours to complete the Advanced Higher and 960 hours to complete the HNC.

Information on the number of credit points allocated to mainstream qualifications can be viewed on the Summary of Credit Points for SCQF Credit Points.

In some instances it may be possible to transfer SCQF credit points to other related learning programmes. Decisions on credit transfer are taken by either SQA, a college or university. The amount of credit that can be transferred will depend on the qualification that you wish to transfer the credit to and how relevant the earlier programme of learning is to the new programme.