While the tide is turning, there are still a lot of organizations out there without job architecture. A job architecture's goal is organization-wide alignment of all jobs in a company into a structure which may be used to address: workforce planning, job levels, job titling, career movement and pay.
Small organizations may not need job architecture because many start with one, or just a few, people in a function. Career growth comes through promotion, but the value of the position is not relative to others in as complicated a way as it would be if there were many, disparate jobs. If a function grows and there are a handful of jobs in a department, the organization might design a career ladder for those jobs as a solution.
But let's look at some examples where job architecture fits like a glove. Small Life Science and Accounting companies, for instance, often use job architecture because most of their jobs are professional, and career movement relative to levels of increasing competency and responsibility has a rigor dictated by their professions. In another example, a company with large numbers of operational and support staff may develop a job architecture to define and communicate career ladders and lateral opportunities. And to name just one rationale for their use of job architecture, complex and global organizations may need to administer many levels of supervision and management.
How can you brush up on job architecture? The best way is to work through the design process--and I hope all of us will have this opportunity at least once in our careers. It is such a great way to learn in detail about the relative contribution that each job makes to our organization, and about the operational value of having the words to describe each job's contribution to employees.
What to do in the meantime? Well, try to sneak a peek at some other organization's job architecture or go to a professional meeting where an example is outlined. The basic components are not foreign to everyday compensation work. The distinction is that, with job architecture, you are working toward organizational alignment so that jobs from all over a company, or country, share a common structure based on standardized guidelines that are used consistently.
One sidebar on that: job architecture may be developed for different purposes and offer different outcomes. The versions that emphasize pay (and slot career growth into pay levels) look and act somewhat differently than the ones that are created specifically to align both pay and career growth. The second part of this article will go over the distinctions.
Margaret O'Hanlon brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm is re:Think Consulting. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at everythingiscommunication.com. She is a member of U.S. Masters Swimming.
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