

Research has shown a direct link between accurate job descriptions and attrition; 43% of employees who leave within 90 days state the reason for leaving is that their day-to-day role wasn’t what they expected.
Many organisations are moving to a skills-based approach and redesigning their operating models and strategies to have skills at their core. This enables them to become more agile, to have higher levels of employee engagement, to encourage innovation and to show faster rates of growth.
A clear, streamlined job structure helps an organisation map out possible career paths and communicate these to employees, so they can be informed about any training and development opportunities and see possible routes up and around the organisation.
Employees will have clear visibility of roles across the organisation and can identify possible roles in different teams and departments rather than simply focusing on movement within their current team.
Planning your workforce around the skills that are needed now and in the future is a critical task that all local authorities need to undertake. EY suggests seven steps for a public sector focussed workforce planning strategy, to identify the skills that an organisation requires and to plan a workforce around these:
Define and articulate a purpose-driven vision of the future
Define the organisational structure and transformation strategy
Review the capacity and capability of the current workforce
Evaluate short, medium and long-term workforce needs
Model any projected workforce gaps.
Fill any gaps by upskilling and re-skilling, bringing in external talent or allocating scarce resources across different departments and agencies
Continue to assess the impact of emerging technologies, plot “technology disruption curves,” and continually recast existing roles and create new ones.
All of these steps are made easier by having a robust, future-focused job titling framework and job structure.
Traditional ways of working have been replaced with digital transformation happening across the public and private sector. Those using public services have very different expectations about how they access services now, compared to five or ten years ago.
These changes can make it difficult for local authorities to keep their job content up to date and reflect the realities of the jobs that people are undertaking. Digitising and centralising job content makes this process much easier, as changes can be made quickly and easily to the job content or an update to multiple job roles is required.
It can be difficult to know where to start with a job transformation. When faced with a chaotic picture of multiple job titles across various business areas and regions, the response can be to put this task into the “too hard” box and delay it for another year, in the hope it sorts itself out. However, this can create issues, open organisations vulnerable to compliance risk or slow down strategic people initiatives.
As a starting point for any organisation, technology can fast-track the harmonisation of your organisation’s job titles, reducing the process from years or months to just weeks, giving you the scope to start transforming jobs across your council or local authority.
Read our guide to job transformation
RoleMapper equips HR and Reward leaders with the fundamental building blocks of any workforce strategy. Our AI-powered platform enables organisations to clean, update and manage their job architecture and job data, as well as automate and connect the creation, editing and management of job documents, including job profiles and job descriptions.
We provide actionable intelligence, creating, shaping and enriching an organisation’s culture and driving long-term business success.