• Employment. Every person in a company has a job, regardless of how many roles they ultimately perform in their work for the company. Employment usually involves an employment contract with the associated terms and conditions of employment. Some companies assign several roles to a single function that forms the basis of the employment. SBB, for example, subsumes various roles under the function of BizDevOps Engineer. This means that there is only one job for all roles in this function. Example: A person in the role of Application Engineer or Business Analyst is hired as a BizDevOps Engineer.
• Function. Companies sometimes distinguish between function and role. This is usually the case when there are several roles for one function. See the example from SBB. In companies where this distinction is not necessary, the function is equivalent to the role.

• Job description. In addition to their employment contract, every person in a company receives a job description. This is specific to the company and is derived from the framework conditions of the role to be performed: tasks, authority, responsibility – classic TCR (tasks, competencies, responsibility).
• Salary or fee. The employment contract determines the salary or, in the case of freelancers, the fee. We refer you to the salary and fee studies conducted by swissICT.
• Authority. A person has various authorities based on their role. These are company–specific and derive from organisational governance.
• Responsibility. Tasks entail certain responsibilities. These are company–specific. We focus on formulating tasks and leave it to companies to derive responsibilities.

At the centre of the model is the role, which is described by various interlinked elements. Each role has

• a designation in German and English
• a brief description (concise summary of the main tasks)
• synonymous designations
• a role number
• a level: S1 – S5 / M1 – M4
• a description of the tasks
• training
• competence and competence level

The level of a role is determined by the underlying competencies and their competency levels. We distinguish between levels S1 to S5 and M1 to M4. The names of the levels are specific to each company. A well-known naming pattern that has been used in this work for a long time is:

• S1: Junior
• S2: Professional
• S3: Senior
• S4: Expert
• S5: Senior Expert
• M1: Lower management
• M2: Middle management
• M3: Senior management
• M4: Top management

In this document, we have only specified the levels that appear in sufficient numbers in the swissICT salary survey.

The tasks of a role are divided into technical tasks and tasks involving social interaction. We make this distinction to emphasise that in ICT, nothing works without teamwork and all roles involve interaction with other people – usually on an interdisciplinary basis.

These tasks have at least one responsibility, which is therefore also assigned to the role. The responsibility determines which tasks must be performed within the role. Responsibilities are specific to each company and are not defined further here.

The performance of a role requires specific personal, technical and methodological as well as business and job–related competencies. The ICT Roles work uses one and the same competency model for roles. It only distinguishes between competency levels. These competency levels determine how well a competency is mastered and thus directly influence how effectively someone can perform in the respective role.