Vertical career ladders that we and our employees once climbed have changed. Today, careers are like a playground with a variety of structures for employees to move through, up, down, laterally and diagonally. These multi-directional career journeys of exploration and adventure offer vast choices and allow employees to lead their own adventures.
But which skills and experiences will they need to get where they want to be? And how are digital skills and digital talent affecting careers?
To attract and retain the best talent, organizations need to ask themselves these questions as well as acknowledge (and accept) that work will continue to change and adapt. Organizations need to create an integrated career ecosystem that focuses on unlocking the potential and performance of in-demand talent that may be scarce as new technologies arise.
Claire Gorick and Laurie Bienstock, WTW experts in work, rewards and careers, discuss the importance of a robust job architecture — an essential element to an integrated career ecosystem — and how that architecture can help organizations become a place that attracts and retains key talent.
Claire Gorick: A job architecture is a common grouping of skills and talent within an organization. These groupings manifest as job families and job functions that often are combined with job leveling or knowledge architecture. Your job architecture is fundamental to the foundation for most of your organization’s people programs, including employee compensation, career development and a host of other offerings.
Claire: As organizations undergo digital transformation and the nature of work evolves, we are seeing new types of jobs emerging in the market. Globally, organizations are grappling with AI and machine learning, and there is a scarcity of talent within these groups. It’s important that an organization’s job architecture remains current and updated to reflect these new talent and skills groups as well as organize jobs to build a consistent foundation for people programs.
Laurie Bienstock: I totally agree. The global economy also is uncertain, and we often see organizations assessing their talent and being cautious about hiring. A job architecture will help organizations understand where there are core common skills that sit across job families. Also, a job architecture may surface many common skills among jobs that also include some emerging skills.
Having an agile job architecture can help organizations that are hesitant to hire talent that may already be in the organization and can be developed in other job families. Attaching skills to job families has created the potential for organizations to provide career experiences for existing employees in new ways. This can unlock potential for both career experiences as well as workforce planning and creating a robust talent pipeline.
Laurie: A decade ago, we might have said there were tech companies and non-tech companies. Today, every company is a tech company. Technology has infiltrated the way work is accomplished in every industry, from retail to healthcare, from education to manufacturing and more.
This change has meaning for every type of job. It also has meaning for new types of emerging work and the talent needed in all organizations. Software engineers, data scientists and data analysts are in demand across the entire workforce. This increases the so-called war for talent when it comes to filling roles that have specialized skills. It also increases the need for the type of learning and development organizations need so everyone is as tech savvy as they need to be.
Laurie: This rapid growth of technology means certain jobs may be taken over by technology. However, even if some jobs are simplified or taken over by AI, for example, we will still need humans in the loop to take the output from those automated responses and use them appropriately and strategically. In a robust job architecture, those humans in the loop will have their jobs clearly defined.
Laurie: The concept of enterprise-wide job families is a topic we’ve been talking about with a lot of our clients. Fifteen to 20 years ago, we often started with a job architecture that mirrored the organization’s structure. There was a finance job family, an HR job family, a technology job family.
Now, as digital skills become more necessary across the organization, we see things like data analytics sit in a job family that any part of the organization could use — like project management or even emerging areas like security, which could include digital security, physical security or cybersecurity.
Laurie: As one of the major changes we’ve seen, the concept of enterprise-wide job families means organizations need to keep pace with defining job families, knowledge and skills so that anyone in the organization can use that to define jobs. In turn, this leans into skills, so organizations understand where those skills sit across the organization.
Claire: I agree. In HR and finance, for example, defining the job family and being clear about the knowledge they need might be enough. However, in these families, digital skills to conduct the work are evolving so quickly that it’s critical to get to that next level of granularity. That is then used as the currency when developing and retaining talent.
I think the concept of job families is relatively stable, but we’re finding it helpful to add that extra level of skills definition that is required for those talent groups.
Claire: Organizations need to ask themselves: How critical is your digital talent? To Laurie’s point, every company is now a tech company, but there is a spectrum depending on your organization’s primary products and services. Are you a tech company delivering digital products to clients? Or are you in an industry that is not primarily tech but has adjacencies?
Claire: Once you understand where you are on that spectrum, then you need to take a good look at your current job architecture. Many of our clients have some kind of job architecture (regardless of whether they call it that) and they need to be clear on how confident they are about it. Is there a home for some of these new digital talent groups you’re looking to recruit? Is there noise in other parts of the organization about how current salary ranges can accommodate the digital talent you want to bring in? Do you have career development and clear career paths for digital roles?
Oftentimes, clients come to us because they’re hearing that the way they’re managing careers isn’t working for some of that new digital talent. If you’re hearing that noise, it’s absolutely time to consider updating your job architecture.
Laurie: Exactly. And it’s important to create this at the right altitude, meaning the objectives for an organization building AI-driven cars or optical technology are different from those for a tech-enabled organization selling clothing or furniture.
Define your objectives based on your business goals and meeting your customers’ needs. This isn’t an infrastructure just for HR; rather, it helps drive your organization’s specific strategic priorities.
Claire: Start by assessing what you already have so you’ll have a better idea of what you need. Our digital tools, from a job architecture health check to skills scans and job leveling provide a quick way to assess your organization’s current job architecture state as well as compare it to a best-in-class future state. It also highlights areas of opportunity. Do you just need to tweak around the edges to accommodate some of these new emerging talent groups? Or is there a bigger opportunity to review your job architecture and review other areas of the organization as well?
Once you understand the breadth of work ahead of you, you will then need to understand the work to be done and how critical it is to the organization. How detailed do you need to be to define the work and understand how these jobs contribute to the organization?
Our advisory analytics team leverages cutting edge web-scraping technology to research internal and external market sources to help clients stay current with new and emerging job families.
My final piece of advice is to remember that this is not a once-and-done exercise. Expect to keep your job architecture updated, especially in the next few years as skills continue to change and emerge. Maintaining a versatile and agile job architecture that incorporates skills can extend your organization’s ability to remain competitive and responsive in the face of disruption.
