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Getting your job data house in order is never as easy as it first seems. You need to get a consolidated view of the jobs that you have in your organisation to understand the commonality of skills, jobs and work and the overriding framework that will be required for job families.
The traditional way to do this is to use a top-down approach involving in-depth conversations with individual teams to gain an understanding of what a specific function or department does, what jobs exist and the nature of work and skills. The challenge is that this can be quite a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.
Step one: consolidate and harmonise all your job data.
At RoleMapper, we recommend fast-tracking this with a data-driven approach, where you consolidate all your jobs across the organisation to identify commonalities of work and skills. Advancements in AI and Natural Language Processing can be a real game-changer. Leveraging this technology enables you to process large data sets from across the organisation to rapidly identify similarities and commonalities across all your jobs and create groupings aligned to the nature of work and skills, breaking down boundaries of organisational structures.
For example, a data-driven approach might show similarities and commonalities in jobs and skills across the organisation involving managing projects and programmes. This could lead to them being grouped together in one job family pulling in roles from different teams and departments. The traditional, siloed approach involving conversations with individual teams would have missed this opportunity.
Step two: Design and Benchmarking
Having consolidated all your job data, you now need to identify the groupings of jobs, work and skills that will form your job families.
Everyone thinks that their organisation is very different, but our analysis shows us that about 80% of job families, jobs, job data, job titling and job content are consistent across most organisations with approximately 20% variation based on the industry sector you are in and the specifics of your business.
Four ways to design job families:
Function: creating job families based on existing organisational functions such as HR, Finance, IT
Occupation: In some organisations, it may work to create job families based on certain occupations such as Engineers and Research Scientists
Business unit: job families can also be created based on business units such as call centres or production units
Skill: this involves creating job families based on skills or capabilities such as project management or innovation
Our recommendation is to start by looking for opportunities for skills-based job families and then build the rest of your job families around functions or occupations/business units as required.
To illustrate the advantages of starting with a skills-based approach, let’s again take project management roles as an example.
You will probably find project management roles in different functions across your organisation. If job families are designed within individual functions, these project management roles will be confined to individual, functional job families.
A skills-based approach would be to create a centralised “Project Management” job family within which all the different project management roles would sit.
Our recommendation is to have a mix of skills-based and function/occupation/ business unit job families, first identifying any opportunities for skills-based job families and then completing the framework with job families aligned to functions, occupations or business units.
