What Is A Job Architecture?
A Job Architecture is a structured framework within an organization that defines and organizes jobs or roles in a systematic way. It’s not just a list or spreadsheet – built and managed properly, it actually serves as a foundation for managing various aspects of the workforce, such as talent acquisition, compensation, career progression, and talent management.
The ideal Job Architecture 💙
To work most effectively, your Job Architecture should help define what skills are needed for which roles, on an ongoing basis.
It’s crucial that any Job Architecture is dynamic – meaning that the data is updated automatically, any time the standard skills required for a particular role evolve. AI can work behind the scenes to deliver that real-time view, and help ensure accuracy and relevancy.
Your own hiring data can also feed into the job architecture, to ensure it reflects what is actually happening ‘on the ground’.
The Job Architecture should then be “connected” with other pieces of skills data – employee data, candidate data, and wider labor market data. This connection is what will help you find, hire, onboard, upskill, and move talent around in a smart, fair and efficient way.
Your Job Architecture can then serve as a key link between your organization’s talent demand (the work and skills needed) and your talent supply (the talent and skills that are available to your organization).
A dynamic Job Architecture based around the language of skills can help you lay the foundation for future skills-based hiring, and the development and redeployment of talent.
Components of a Job Architecture 🧱
1. Job Families and Job Levels
You should start by grouping similar jobs together, based on skills, function, or responsibilities (e.g., Finance, IT, Marketing).
You’d then consider different hierarchical levels within a job family, reflecting varying degrees of responsibility or complexity (e.g. Entry-Level Analyst, Senior Analyst, Manager).
2. Job Descriptions
Naturally, each job is described based on the skills needed to do it. Responsibilities and expectations might come into this as well, to make it easier to generate specific vacancy descriptions in the future as they are needed. AI can help you work out what should be included here, based on your own company data and external labor market insights.
3. Compensation Structure
Most Job Architectures would contain a framework for determining how jobs are compensated within the organization, often linked to job levels. This is why it’s incredibly useful to “feed” your Job Architecture with external labor market data, and better understand what a “competitive” salary would look like for each role or collection of skills.
4. Career Paths
Define progression routes within the organization, showing how employees can advance through different job levels and families. This will be based around skills as well: what skills does someone need to acquire in order to move to a more senior position in the team?
5. Competency Framework
Outline the specific skills, behaviors, and attributes required for success in each job family and level. This is often linked to performance evaluations and development plans. The more objective your competency framework is, the fairer your talent management becomes.
6. Connection to Talent Management Tools
A Job Architecture needs to be connected to your other HR technology and databases, in order to guide recruitment, development, and retention strategies, and ensure full alignment with broader organizational goals.
Benefits of a skills-based Job Architecture 😍
- Consistency and Fairness: Get a transparent and standardized approach to job classification and compensation, based on one common language.
- Career Development: Help employees understand potential career paths and the requirements for progression. Retain, upskill and reskill your workforce more easily.
- Talent Management: Get more strategic with workforce planning, and spot skill gaps before they become a real issue.
- Efficiency: Streamline HR processes. It will be easier to manage job descriptions, compensation, and performance, with a single source of truth.
A dynamic skills-based Job Architecture helps you to structure your workforce in a way that supports both operational efficiency and strategic objectives. It ensures that the right people are in the right roles at all times, with a clear path for growth and development.
Whether you have an existing skills taxonomy or need to start from scratch, Beamery helps organizations like yours build a single source of truth for jobs and skills in just a matter of days.
Our dynamic Job Architecture is powered by explainable AI, and incorporates insights from the wider talent market, as well as competitor trends, to ensure that the information remains up to date – giving talent leaders a view of the skills they need today, and those they need for the future.