Career paths are not difficult to define, but they do take time and intentional focus.

Step 1 - Group jobs by their functional focus. Example job families include Accounting, Finance, Legal, Sales, Operations, HR, IT, Marketing, Communications, Government Relations, etc.

Step 2 - Define career levels so you can group jobs based on an internal equity focus. You may have one set of career levels for every job or a couple sets.

· Example #1: A mining company developed career level definitions for Craft (C1 – C4), Administrative (A1 – A4), Professional (P1 – P5), Management (M1 – M5), and Executive (E1 – E3) jobs.

· Example #2: A non-profit organization with less than 100 employees chose to have a set of Professional career levels (P1 – P4) and Management (M1 – M5) levels which included executives.

Step 3 - Proactively design jobs to ensure that there is a logical path for employees and their managers to use as they develop their skills and capabilities. Of course, make sure these jobs and the work being performed are needed by the company. Otherwise, you will be increasing labor costs without an appropriate level of return for that cost. This step requires that you write job descriptions.

Psst…you just made progress on developing a component of your job architecture. AND you now have a way to create job comparator groups for a pay equity analysis.

If you need help developing and communicating your career paths, let’s chat.

#compensation #rewards #careerpaths #careerdevelopment #hr #humanresources #jobarchitecture #jobfamilies #internalequity #payequity #paytransparency