Whether an organization is global or domestic, large or small, a formal job architecture and systematic job leveling approach can serve as the foundation for consistent and integrated talent and rewards programs in a changing workplace.
While structurally connecting employees to reward and career frameworks, job architecture and job leveling also represent your organization’s commitment to providing the tools that unlock potential, opportunity and performance.
What is job architecture?
Your organization’s job architecture is the common grouping of skills and talent within your company. As organizations undergo digital transformations and the nature of jobs evolves, we see new types of jobs emerging. Your architecture needs to remain current and be updated to reflect new talent and skills groups.
As you assess your talent and consider your workforce strategy, your job architecture will help you understand where core common skills sit across job families. Having an agile job architecture will help you determine whether you already have the talent you need somewhere in your organization. You may already have employees who can apply “like” skills into new job families, supporting an improved employee experience and better talent deployment in your organization.
A solid job architecture:
- Aligns jobs across regions or different lines of business
- Enables use of skills to develop careers and impact pay strategies
- Showcases career pathing opportunities within and across job families
A job architecture provides the basic organizing construct for aligning jobs within an organization based on the types of work performed (functions, families, disciplines, job titles, job codes). Regardless of the current job architecture landscape in your organization, WTW can review, update and integrate existing solutions into an optimized approach or develop a new solution from the ground up. Our approach helps organizations to:
- Align jobs located in multiple regions or across different lines of business.
- Create an integrated framework for the organization and employees after a merger, acquisition or other structural change.
- Provide a basis for carrying out fair pay analysis e.g. gender pay equity.
- Drive consistency, competitiveness and efficiency among HR policies and practices
- Clarify distinctions among levels to support career development.
What is job leveling?
Once the functions and families are in place, the job leveling process is used to determine the relative value of jobs in your organization and serves as an input to comparing jobs in the external market, developing a consistent titling construct and refining job codes as needed. Your organization can address business needs like talent attraction, engagement and retention; cost and risk management; and governance of your total rewards program delivery. Job leveling:
- Aligns your rewards and career framework with business needs, strategy, culture and your talent value proposition
- Creates consistency across HR with a common terminology as the core for rewards, performance expectations and other people programs
- Builds a foundation that supports links to organization and job-specific competencies and skills
- Levels jobs and work to establish the foundation for consistent benchmarking of jobs to external market data
- Helps ensure pay transparency and pay equity
Through job leveling, you determine the relative contribution of jobs within your organization and set the foundation for effective talent and reward management.
Your career framework foundation
When you combine your job architecture with your job levels, you develop an integrated career framework that:
- Ties to business strategy and internal values
- Creates a common language across the organization to facilitate mobility, development and communication of careers through the organization
- Provides consistent alignment of people programs
- Delivers a basis for describing work requirements and performance expectations
- Facilitates integration of new organizations, re-structuring and other organizational structure changes
- Supports HRMS optimization
- Provides a cost-effective approach to talent management and reward program design and delivery
Custom and integrated solutions
There is no single job leveling or job architecture solution that fits all organizations. We offer a range of job architecture and job leveling approaches, from established methodologies to custom solutions.
WTW has two proprietary leveling approaches: Global Grading System (GGS) and Career Map, both of which are integrated with our automated job leveling (AJL) feature. These approaches can be used on their own, combined or serve as a baseline for your bespoke leveling criteria. Our solutions are more flexible than traditional methods to ensure that they are easy to understand and implement, as well as enable compliance with pay equity regulatory requirements.
We blend and shape elements of existing programs with the latest thinking, our established methodologies and leading-edge, user-friendly software to deliver job leveling and job architecture solutions that meet your specific needs. Our solutions work seamlessly to provide the essential framework you need for analyzing, planning and managing your reward and career programs. And it’s solutions like these that ensure a sound foundation to align and boost the efficiencies of all employee-centric activities.
Irrespective of whatever job leveling and job architecture solution you choose, you will have peace of mind knowing that you are backed by WTW experts in rewards, talent, HR software, communications and change management. Moreover, our job leveling and job architecture solutions align to the largest source of compensation data in the world, helping power your decision-making based on facts rather than extrapolation.
