Engineering
Skills Model
The Engineering Skills Model (ESM) is a competency framework developed by Codility’s team of industrial-organizational psychologists. It describes the higher-order, role-relevant competencies required for success across technical job families.
Rather than asking whether an engineer knows Python or React, the model organizes engineering work around durable competencies: solving problems, architecting systems, building reliable software, and working effectively with AI.
Developed over multiple years following established best practices for competency modeling, the ESM is anchored against 30+ authoritative frameworks, including SWEBOK v4, SFIA v9, O*NET, the NIST AI RMF, and Anthropic’s AI Fluency framework.
It was refined with dozens of internal and external subject-matter experts and validated through large-scale surveys spanning six job families and 24 countries.
Version 2.1 is the most substantial restructuring since the model’s inception, built in three phases: a structured survey of the skills landscape, subject-matter-expert input, and a confirmation survey of Codility’s engineering organization.
Key changes: Artificial Intelligence elevated to a first-class, cross-cutting category; architecture skills consolidated into Software & Systems Architecture; Project Management added to Business; and programming languages and technologies brought into the model as the Technology Stack category.
30 skills and 180 subskills, organized into five categories:
The ESM is a competency model, not a selection procedure. It provides a defensible foundation of job-relevant constructs but does not by itself establish the validity of any hiring decision.
It is intentionally forward-looking: every task on the Codility platform maps to an ESM skill, but not every skill has a task yet. The model is governed, versioned, and revised on evidence by Codility’s Assessment Science team as the field evolves.