Career Paths | Why the need for Job Families?

Many organisations are struggling to control the chaos of inconsistent job data and content. With no governance or overall management, it can be impossible to gain a clear view of pay and career paths. We look at how Job Families are key to regaining control.

Job families and job functions can help organisations establish a robust framework, ensuring transparent career paths or a more effective shift to a skills-based approach. They can be particularly useful when there is a lot of variation in job titles between different functions.

Essentially, a job family is a group of related jobs within an organisation that share similar skill sets and nature of work. Although the level of responsibility, the skills required to do the work and the scope of the role may differ, the essential nature of the activities and the basic skills used will be similar for all roles within a job family.

They are not to be confused with ‘Job family groups’ or ‘job functions’ which are higher-level categories that include multiple job families; Finance or General Administration are good examples of a job function.