Job Description With Uk Gdad Pcf and Agenda For Change

This skill combines three separate things into one document: a Job Description's standard shape, the UK GDAD Profession Capability Framework's role content, and the NHS's Agenda for Change (AfC) job evaluation scheme for banding. It's specifically for digital, data, and technology roles in the NHS (or another public body using AfC) where the role's content comes from one national framework and its pay grade comes from a different, unrelated one.

Why these two frameworks don't map directly

• United Kingdom Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework (GDAD PCF) describes what a role is accountable for and which named skills it requires, at which of typically 4–6 levels (e.g. Associate, Practitioner, Senior Practitioner, Lead Practitioner, Head of Profession). It says nothing about pay.
• Agenda for Change (AfC) is the NHS's national pay and grading system: 9 pay bands (Band 1 lowest, Band 9 highest, with very senior roles sitting outside AfC entirely), each graded through the NHS Job Evaluation Scheme (JES) — a factor-based scheme scoring a role against 16 factors (communication and relationship skills; knowledge, training and experience; analytical and judgemental skills; planning and organisational skills; physical skills; responsibilities for patient/client care, policy/service development, financial and physical resources, human resources, information resources, and research and development; freedom to act; physical, mental, and emotional effort; and working conditions).

A DDaT/GDAD level is not a band. The same "Senior Practitioner" level can land at Band 7 in one trust and Band 8a in another, because AfC banding depends on how the specific role scores against JES factors locally — not on the GDAD level name. Treat any level-to-band mapping as a starting hypothesis for local job evaluation, never as the answer.

How to draft the document

1. Anchor the content in GDAD PCF. Identify the profession, role, and level in the framework (see United Kingdom Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework for finding it). Pull the role summary and named skills at that level — these become the job description's Job Summary and Key Responsibilities.
2. Draft the job description shell. Follow Job Description's standard components: title, directorate/team, reports to, job summary, key responsibilities (from step 1), essential and preferred qualifications, and location/work arrangement. Add a Band field, marked "indicative, pending job evaluation" until a trust's evaluation panel confirms it.
3. Build the Person Specification against JES factors. NHS trusts typically require a Person Specification split into Essential and Desirable, organized under headings that map onto JES factors most panels actually score against: Qualifications, Experience, Skills and Knowledge, Communication, and Analytical/Judgemental ability. Draw the specifics from the GDAD skill descriptors for that level, phrased so an evaluator can score them, not just so a candidate can read them.
4. Get an indicative band, then verify it. Prefer profile matching first: compare the drafted role against the trust's existing matched national/local job profiles for similar DDaT roles, and if it matches closely, that profile's band applies directly. Where no close match exists, fall back to full JES scoring, where a trained job evaluator or panel scores the drafted job description itself against the 16 factors to produce a band. Either way, the band in the drafted document is a proposal for the trust's job evaluation team, not a final answer — never present it as confirmed until that process has run.

Rough, non-binding level-to-band starting points

Useful only as a first guess to sanity-check a draft against — actual outcomes vary by trust and by how the specific role scores:

| GDAD PCF level | Commonly seen indicative AfC band | | --- | --- | | Associate / Assistant | Band 3–4 | | Practitioner | Band 5–6 | | Senior Practitioner | Band 6–7 | | Lead Practitioner | Band 7–8a | | Principal / Head of Profession | Band 8b–8c | | Director-level | Band 8d–9 (or outside AfC) |

Common pitfalls

• Treating the GDAD level as the band — the two frameworks measure different things; skipping local job evaluation and just declaring a band invites an equal-pay or grading challenge later.
• Person Specification written for candidates, not evaluators — JES panels score against specific, evidenced statements; vague language ("good communicator") scores worse than specifics ("briefs senior clinical and non-clinical stakeholders on technical risk in plain language").
• No Essential/Desirable split — collapses the distinction an evaluation panel and a hiring panel both need.
• Copying a GDAD role summary verbatim as the Job Summary — GDAD's wording is written for the framework's general audience across all of government, not for a specific trust's team and context; adapt it.
• Ignoring existing matched profiles — reinventing a full JES evaluation for a role the trust (or NHS nationally) has already profile-matched wastes the evaluation panel's time and can produce an inconsistent band across similar roles.

Learn more

• Job Description for the generic document shape and its own common pitfalls (requirements-as-wish-list, gendered language, stale descriptions).
• United Kingdom Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework for finding a role level's summary and named skills.
• Performance Review Meeting for how the resulting responsibilities get used once someone is in the role.