Maintain Job and Career Architecture

Flow · 7 controlled steps

1. 01

   Charter the architecture decision

   Define why the structure exists and which decisions it must support.

   • — Define scope, business outcomes, workforce populations, geographies, downstream uses, exclusions, timing, and success evidence.
   • — Name decision, operating, data, consultation, and specialist owners.
   • — Inventory current titles, levels, ranges, career paths, systems, policies, and known inconsistencies.
   • — Set principles for internal alignment, market use, career access, simplicity, and controlled exceptions.

   Responsible

   Job architecture owner

   Output

   Job Architecture Charter

   Decision

   Is the architecture mandate sufficiently useful, bounded, owned, and reviewable?

2. 02

   Inventory representative work

   Build the structure from actual contribution rather than incumbents or titles.

   • — Sample roles and work across functions, sites, tracks, levels, shifts, and material workforce contexts.
   • — Capture purpose, outcomes, scope, complexity, judgment, knowledge, authority, interfaces, working conditions, and required qualifications.
   • — Identify equivalent work hidden by different titles and materially different work hidden by the same title.
   • — Separate enduring work patterns from temporary assignments and person-specific strengths.

   Responsible

   Job architecture owner

   Output

   Representative Work Inventory

   Decision

   Is the evidence representative enough to design structural relationships?

3. 03

   Design families and career tracks

   Group related work and make credible contribution paths visible.

   • — Group roles by shared purpose, work, knowledge, capability, and talent market.
   • — Define job families and subfamilies only where they support meaningful decisions.
   • — Design individual-contributor, technical or scientific expert, managerial, production, skilled, or other tracks appropriate to the work.
   • — Describe lateral, cross-family, and track-change paths without implying automatic eligibility.

   Responsible

   Job architecture owner

   Output

   Draft Family and Track Model

   Decision

   Do the proposed families and tracks reflect actual work and usable career relationships?

4. 04

   Define levels and reference roles

   Create distinguishable work levels using factors that can be applied consistently.

   • — Define common level factors such as scope, complexity, judgment, influence, knowledge, problem horizon, accountability, and operating context.
   • — Translate factors into track- and family-relevant indicators without requiring every role to look identical.
   • — Select reference roles and boundary examples that make distinctions inspectable.
   • — Test adjacent levels for meaningful differences and remove decorative proliferation.

   Responsible

   Job architecture owner

   Output

   Level Framework · Reference Role Set

   Decision

   Can qualified users distinguish adjacent levels from work evidence?

5. 05

   Map roles and test system effects

   Evaluate the architecture against real roles, pay, careers, and operating consequences before approval.

   • — Map representative roles using job content and document ambiguity and exceptions.
   • — Test internal relationships, career paths, spans, organization shape, range relationships, title conventions, and system feasibility.
   • — Analyze unexplained pay, demographic, access, location, and incumbent effects with qualified support.
   • — Review classification, labor, safety, quality, credential, and jurisdiction implications with appropriate specialists.
   • — Revise the structure rather than forcing poor-fit roles into it.

   Responsible

   People and compensation partner

   Output

   Role Mapping Analysis · Architecture Impact Review

   Decision

   Is the architecture coherent, usable, affordable to administer, and acceptable in risk?

6. 06

   Approve and publish the architecture

   Create one authoritative structure and transition plan for connected processes.

   • — Approve families, tracks, levels, factors, reference roles, movement logic, mappings, exceptions, ownership, and validity.
   • — Define who may create, map, remap, rename, or approve exceptions.
   • — Publish the authoritative version, implementation sequence, communications, manager guidance, and system changes.
   • — Separate architecture approval from individual pay, progression, classification, or employment decisions.

   Responsible

   Job architecture decision owner

   Output

   Approved Job and Career Architecture · Architecture Transition Plan

   Decision

   Is this exact architecture version ready for controlled downstream use?

7. 07

   Operate, govern, and improve the architecture

   Keep the structure aligned with changing work without permitting title and level drift.

   • — Process new-role, changed-role, mapping, title, level, family, and exception requests through defined authority.
   • — Monitor adoption, mapping quality, exceptions, career use, market and organization changes, and downstream defects.
   • — Review the framework at defined cadence and material triggers using current work evidence.
   • — Version approved changes prospectively, migrate affected records, notify connected owners, and preserve history.

   Responsible

   Job architecture owner

   Output

   Architecture Decision Record · Updated Architecture Version · Connection Notices

   Decision

   Does the request fit the current structure or justify controlled architectural change?

Connections

Seams · 19 hops within 2 steps

Upstream and downstream neighbourhood over public reference processes only. Each hop shows the trigger, carried objects, and what the receiving process loses if the producing step is skipped.

Roles

Systems + Data

Measures

Evidence + judgment

Draft reference standard. Requires qualified compensation, employment, labor, pay-equity, classification, accessibility, safety, quality, credentialing, data, tax, regulatory, and jurisdiction-specific review before deployment.