Job Architecture

What is Job Architecture?

Job architecture is a way to organize your company’s functions, job families, jobs and career levels to ensure internal comparability and boost career mobility. Building a strong job architecture system is always the first foundational step on the road to developing competitive compensation and talent programs. Below are some quick definitions to help you think about the creation of a job architecture for your organization:

• Job function: Group of roles within major professional areas that perform related types of work.
• Job family: A group of jobs related to each other by their nature, required skills and career paths.
• Job levels: Hierarchies of jobs within each family, based on the degree of knowledge, complexity, impact, autonomy and scope.
• Job titles: Labels that reflect the job family, level and function of each role.

Why is Job Architecture Important?

Rapid business growth, mergers and acquisitions and divestitures can all lead to the proliferation of new jobs and titles within an organization. These disruptions can lead to increasing inconsistencies in job leveling, pay and titles. This is where job architecture comes into play — it can help us bring order to the chaos. Beyond that, it serves as a foundation for career frameworks, salary structures, pay equity analysis and people analytics.

At its core, a job architecture helps to align an organization’s human resources strategy with its business strategy, ensuring greater consistency and transparency in talent management processes. Addressing structural issues in an organization’s job architecture and career framework is the first step toward building sustainable pay equity practices and meeting pay transparency requirements. A robust job architecture and career framework can create a work environment that supports employee development and retention. Having a strong foundation in place can help identify the workforce skills an organization needs both today as well as in the future.

Job architecture can help organizations attract, retain and motivate talent by providing the workforce with a clearer understanding of their roles and responsibilities, as well as charting a path for future career progression and mobility within the organization. These outcomes all contribute to a sustainable employee value proposition.

Explore Aon’s Job Architecture Approach

Aon’s job architecture approach establishes the foundation companies and people leaders need to align and implement a successful people strategy. Some of the key questions to ask before building or revising a job architecture approach include:

• Job roles: What are the roles we need now and for the future?
• Future skills: What skills will these roles need to have, and how will they change?
• Skills readiness assessment: How do our current employees stack-up against the future skills we need?
• Strategic workforce planning: How do we actively plug gaps through internal and external talent?
• Adaptable people strategy: How do we create a process that is scalable and replicable?
• Pay transparency considerations: Will our current job architecture satisfy pay transparency requirements?
• Maintenance: How long has it been since we have updated our job architecture?

At Aon, we keep these questions in mind while guiding clients through a process to build a foundational job architecture which answers the challenges they face. Our job architecture structure is composed of five key elements:

Trusted by clients around the world, Aon’s job architecture approach is rooted in our data — including the Radford McLagan Compensation Database — spanning across sectors, geographies, and all sizes of organizations, and is fully flexible, designed to deliver a starting point that can be customized to your needs.

Build Your Next Job Architecture with JobLink^TM

As part of Aon’s job architecture offering, we use JobLink™, Aon’s proprietary job evaluation methodology, which offers clients an approach to evaluate the relative worth or size of jobs within an organization, support for their job architecture programs to create or enhance a structure that ensures fair and equitable compensation, support for performance and talent management strategies around the world, deep industry focus, etc.

Who Do We Partner With?

Aon supports all sizes and types of organization around the world to improve their job architecture. Fill out the form below to get in touch with us to discuss how Aon can help.