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Across many countries, conversations about pay are changing. In some places, regulation is accelerating that shift. In others, it is being driven by employees asking more direct questions or by leaders recognising that long-standing pay decisions are becoming harder to explain.
At RoleMapper, this is often the point where organisations start to involve us. Pay may be the immediate concern, but it is rarely the root of the issue. More often, organisations are grappling with how roles have evolved, how they are compared and how pay decisions are governed over time.
Job families only work when they sit within a clear and coherent job architecture
That is where job families tend to come into focus. When they are designed well, job families can bring clarity. They help organisations make sense of work that has grown organically, where roles have drifted and titles no longer provide a reliable guide to contribution. Used properly, they support clearer pay conversations and more grounded discussions about skills and progression.
Pay transparency itself is not new. Many organisations already operate within the context of gender pay reporting, equal pay legislation or internal commitments to openness. What feels different now is the expectation that pay outcomes can be explained clearly and consistently, not just reported.
In the EU, that shift is being formalised through the Pay Transparency Directive, with national laws due by June 2026 and reporting obligations phased in from 2027. A key feature of the Directive is the requirement to assess pay gaps within groups of comparable work, which brings role structure and job groupings into sharper focus.
Elsewhere, similar pressure is building through different mechanisms. For organisations operating across multiple countries, the challenge is rarely about compliance with a single regulation in isolation. It explains pay decisions in a way that makes sense across different markets and to different audiences.
Pay decisions become difficult to defend when there is no shared reference point. Roles are compared informally, judgement fills the gaps and over time inconsistency creeps in, even where intentions are good.
Job families help by providing a more consistent way of looking at work. Grouping roles that draw on similar expertise makes it easier to explain why certain roles sit in similar pay ranges, even when the work itself looks different. It also gives managers and HR teams a clearer anchor for decision-making.
From a governance perspective, this reduces reliance on exceptions and negotiation and makes decisions easier to explain.
Job families influence how skills conversations unfold. Rather than focusing on titles or individual cases, they allow organisations to describe how capability develops within a discipline over time.
Employees often want to understand what progression really looks like. Job families help with that, provided roles are clearly defined and sensibly levelled. They also give organisations better visibility of where skills are strengthening and where gaps may be emerging.
When job families and job groupings are grounded in the same logic, the connection between skills, progression and pay becomes clearer.
One thing we are always careful to say at RoleMapper is that job families are not a shortcut. They are a useful way of grouping related roles across levels, but they are only one part of a wider structure.
Job families can help with organisation and comparability, but they are not designed to assess equal value on their own. That often requires looking across families, particularly where different types of work make a similar contribution. Without a broader architectural view, those comparisons become harder to make and harder to explain.
This is where the levelling framework plays a critical role. A clear and consistently applied levelling framework provides the reference point that allows roles to be compared both within and across job families. Without it, similar contributions can be treated differently and governance becomes more fragile.
Job families work best when they sit within a clear job architecture, supported by agreed role definitions, consistent levelling and oversight as roles evolve.
Pay decisions are under more attention than they used to be. Organisations that rely heavily on informal logic often find themselves revisiting the same issues repeatedly.
Those who invest in a coherent job architecture tend to have a different experience. Job families become a quiet but effective part of the system, supporting clearer job groupings and more consistent pay governance.
From our perspective, that is the real value. Not ticking a compliance box but putting a structure in place that can stand up to scrutiny wherever it comes from.
If questions about pay transparency are starting to surface in your organisation, it is often a sign that the underlying structure needs a closer look.
At RoleMapper, we work with organisations to build job architectures and job families that support clearer pay decisions, stronger governance and more confident conversations about skills and progression.
Problems often surface in pay processes or pay risk, but their root cause usually sits in a weak or inconsistent job architecture:
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RoleMapper is often brought in when organisations are experiencing pressure around pay. Key drivers will include pay equity concerns, challenges with role levelling, difficulty explaining pay decisions, or a growing sense that the pay framework is no longer doing what it’s meant to do.
What we’ve learned time and again is that these issues rarely start with pay itself. They start much earlier, with how jobs are defined, structured, and governed.
Most organisations don’t set out to create unfair or inconsistent pay. In fact, many invest heavily in market data, pay policies and review processes. But pay frameworks don’t operate in isolation. They rely on a job architecture to provide structure and discipline.
When a job architecture is weak, unclear or inconsistently applied, pay systems are forced to compensate. Managers start negotiating pay based on titles, tenure or individual capability. HR teams create exceptions to deal with edge cases and over time, the number of exceptions grows and risk accumulates quietly in the background.
In our experience, when pay feels difficult to manage or defend, it’s usually a sign that the underlying job architecture is doing too little of the heavy lifting.
A common pattern we see is role inconsistency across the organisation. Similar roles are described differently. Levels mean different things in different functions. Job titles are used inconsistently, often to solve local issues rather than reflect role demand.
The impact on pay is significant. Two people doing materially similar work can end up in different levels and pay ranges, not because of performance or market forces, but because their roles have been interpreted differently. This is one of the most common root causes of unexplained pay gaps.
When organisations then run a pay equity analysis, the results can be difficult to interpret or explain. The data points to disparities, but the role structure doesn’t provide a clear, defensible explanation. That creates both regulatory and reputational risk, particularly as expectations around pay transparency continue to rise.
Another risk area is levelling. Without a clear and disciplined job architecture, levelling decisions become highly subjective. Managers argue for higher levels based on scope creep, retention risk or the strength of the individual in the role. HR teams are left without robust criteria to challenge these requests.
Over time, roles drift upwards and grade inflation can set in, particularly in professional and specialist populations. Pay follows level and fixed costs increase without a corresponding increase in organisational value.
This kind of cost creep is difficult to reverse. Once roles are over-levelled and people are paid accordingly, correcting the structure feels personal, even when the role itself hasn’t changed. We often see organisations stuck with inflated structures because the architectural foundations weren’t strong enough in the first place.
Pay governance depends on clarity and internal alignment. When roles are clearly defined and job levels are stable, there is a common understanding of job size that allows policies and controls to function properly.
If a job architecture is weak, governance quickly becomes reactive. Exceptions start to drive decisions, discussions take longer, and outcomes are influenced by the people in the room rather than by the framework itself. Over time, this creates inconsistency and places too much reliance on individual judgement instead of on robust systems.
From a governance standpoint, that is an inherently fragile position.
As organisations move towards greater pay transparency, a weak job architecture becomes more visible. Employees don’t just want to see pay ranges, they want to understand why roles sit where they do.
When organisations can clearly explain how jobs are defined and levelled, transparency builds trust. When they can’t, transparency amplifies frustration and challenge. In our experience, pay transparency without strong job architecture often makes problems more visible rather than solving them.
Organisations with the lowest pay risk typically rely on a simple, well-governed job architecture, where roles are clearly defined, levels are applied consistently and change is managed through governance rather than negotiation.
At RoleMapper, we see job architecture as pay infrastructure. When it’s strong, pay systems work more smoothly, pay decisions are easier to defend and risk is reduced across equity, cost and compliance. When it’s weak, pay is left carrying weight it was never designed to bear.
The next time pay issues surface, it’s worth asking a different question. Not “what’s wrong with our pay framework?”, but “what is our job architecture forcing our pay system to compensate for?” That’s usually where the real risk lies.
Watch our latest on-demand webinar on how to create a strong job architecture to underpin pay processes.
Job levelling has rarely been prioritised in workforce strategy. It typically sits beneath job architecture, skills frameworks and career paths, with the assumption that it is always stable and reliable.
This assumption is no longer holding. As organisations face increasing pressure around pay equity, internal mobility, skills shortages, and trust in decision-making, job levelling is moving from background structure to an active enabler. The quality of levelling is now evident in day-to-day decisions. Where it is weak or inconsistent, friction emerges. Where it is strong, it supports progress across multiple fronts.
When done well, levelling creates clarity and consistency across the organisation, enabling better decisions without adding unnecessary complexity. The eight examples below show how a strong levelling framework enables everything else organisations are trying to achieve today.
At its most fundamental level, a job levelling framework explains how work changes as roles become broader, more complex or more impactful.
Strong job levelling focuses on scope, judgement and accountability rather than job titles or tenure. This creates a shared language for what different levels actually represent, allowing leaders, managers and employees to align their expectations.
Without this shared understanding, roles become harder to compare and expectations begin to drift. With it, conversations about work are clearer, more grounded and more consistent.
Comparing roles across teams and functions is a persistent challenge, particularly in larger or more complex organisations.
A well-designed job levelling framework provides a consistent reference point, allowing roles to be assessed based on the nature of the work rather than where they sit or who happens to be doing them. This comparability supports fairer pay decisions, more robust workforce planning and clearer organisational design.
Where job levelling lacks consistency, these comparisons quickly break down.
Pay equity depends on demonstrating that work at the same level is consistently valued.
Clear job levelling allows organisations to link pay decisions to role expectations rather than individual negotiation, historical anomalies or subjective judgement. Levelling provides a defensible framework for making and explaining decisions.
As pay transparency legislation increases worldwide, this clarity becomes increasingly important.
Many organisations talk about internal mobility as a priority, but far fewer have the structural foundations to make it work in practice.
When job levelling is inconsistent, movement carries risk. Employees worry about being downgraded or having their future progression narrowed. Managers hesitate to approve moves because equivalence between roles is unclear. Even well-intentioned mobility initiatives can stall under this uncertainty.
Consistent job levelling removes much of that friction. Shared levels provide a common reference point for comparing roles across teams and functions, making opportunities easier to assess and movement more credible. This is what allows internal marketplaces, project-based work and cross-functional careers to function as real options rather than aspirations.
Skills are expressed differently depending on the level of work at which they are applied.
A strong levelling framework helps organisations recognise that progression is not only about acquiring new skills, but about applying existing skills at greater scale, with more complexity or through others. This makes transferable skills easier to identify and value, particularly for people with non-linear career paths.
Without clear levelling, skills frameworks struggle to capture this nuance and risk becoming overly generic.
Career progression conversations often become difficult when expectations are unclear or inconsistent.
Levelling provides a concrete way to discuss readiness, development, and next steps by anchoring discussions in observable differences in work. This shifts conversations away from vague notions of seniority towards clearer, more objective criteria.
The result is greater consistency and fewer misunderstandings.
Periods of change put levelling under the most pressure, particularly during mergers, acquisitions or major restructures.
When two organisations come together, roles rarely line up neatly. Titles can look similar while the scope of work differs significantly, or the same level can carry very different expectations. Without a clear levelling framework, alignment becomes subjective, slow and contentious.
A strong levelling framework provides a neutral reference point for comparing roles based on the work itself. It allows organisations to align roles across structures in a transparent and defensible way, reducing uncertainty for employees and enabling faster, fairer integration.
Ultimately, levelling shapes how fair and transparent decisions feel.
When people understand how work is evaluated and how roles relate to one another, outcomes are easier to accept, even when they are not what someone hoped for. When levelling is opaque or inconsistent, trust erodes quickly.
Strong levelling supports confidence that decisions are grounded in a clear and coherent framework.
A levelling framework works best when it is treated as foundational infrastructure rather than a one-off exercise.
It underpins job architecture, skills frameworks, internal movement and pay decisions. When it is clear, consistent and grounded in real work, it enables progress across the organisation. When it is not, everything built on top of it has to work harder.
At RoleMapper, we see how often levelling is either over-engineered or under-explained, and how rarely it is designed with day-to-day use in mind. This is why we are spending time working closely with organisations to understand what levelling needs to deliver in practice, not just in theory.
As organisations expand across regions, job data governance is often one of the first things to fragment. New countries bring different market norms, regulatory requirements and expectations around titles, levels and pay. Over time, what was once a coherent structure becomes a patchwork of local interpretations.
This is rarely the result of poor intent. It is the natural outcome of growth without clear governance. The real challenge is not whether to allow local flexibility, but how to do so without losing consistency, transparency and control.
Strong governance of job data across geographies is now essential. It underpins pay equity, supports compliance with increasing transparency requirements and provides the foundation for credible career frameworks and workforce planning.
Most organisations did not design their job structures to operate globally from day one. Instead, roles evolved organically through restructures, acquisitions and urgent hiring needs.
As new regions are added, local HR teams adapt roles to fit market expectations. Titles are localised, levels interpreted differently and job descriptions rewritten. Over time, these decisions accumulate and inconsistencies emerge.
Common signs include:
Eventually, the organisation struggles to answer basic questions about role comparability, pay equity or progression.
Governance is often mistaken for bureaucracy, but in practice, it creates clarity and speed. Good job data governance defines how roles are created, changed and maintained. It ensures decisions follow agreed standards, are visible to the organisation and can be explained later if needed.
At its core, job data governance answers a few critical questions. Who owns the job data? Who approves changes? What standards must be followed? How are exceptions handled? And how do we know when the structure is drifting?
Unclear ownership is one of the most common causes of governance failure. If responsibility for job data is too diffuse, accountability disappears.
In effective models, ownership sits with a central HR, reward or people operations team. Local teams still play an important role, providing market insight and business context, but final decisions remain anchored to enterprise-wide standards.
Documenting decision rights is essential. People need to understand:
Global job data governance does not mean identical roles everywhere. The key is defining what must be consistent and where variation is appropriate.
Most organisations benefit from setting global standards for job families, level frameworks, core role definitions and naming conventions. Within those boundaries, local flexibility can exist.
Titles may be adjusted for market expectations. Responsibilities may reflect local regulation or customer needs. Pay structures may vary by labour market. What matters is that these differences sit within a governed framework rather than replacing it.
Governance is not a one-off design exercise. It is an ongoing discipline.
Without clear processes, even the best job architecture will erode. New roles appear under pressure. Existing roles evolve informally. Temporary exceptions become permanent.
This is where auditability becomes critical. Organisations need visibility into what changed, when it changed and why. This is increasingly important as pay transparency and equity scrutiny grows across regions.
Simple controls make a significant difference. Standard workflows for role changes, required documentation for exceptions and regular reviews of local deviations all help prevent drift without slowing the business down.
Many organisations still rely on documents and spreadsheets to manage job data. This rarely scales across geographies.
Technology is not the solution in itself, but it is a powerful enabler. A central platform provides visibility, reduces duplication and creates a single source of truth across regions.
The real value comes when governance is embedded into everyday processes. Approval workflows, version control and audit trails make consistency part of how work happens, not an additional burden.
RoleMapper helps organisations manage job data governance across geographies without losing flexibility. Our Job Architecture Workspace provides a single environment to design, manage and maintain job architecture at scale.
RoleArchitect enables organisations to define global standards for job families, roles and levels, while allowing local input through controlled workflows. Built-in version control and audit trails support consistency, transparency and compliance across regions.
If you want to move from fragmented job data to a governed global framework that supports equity, clarity and growth, Rolemapper can help make governance practical and sustainable.
A manager is trying to recognise a high performer. The individual has taken on broader responsibilities, is mentoring others and is clearly operating at a higher level. But when the manager brings this to Reward, the conversation hits a wall because there is no shared reference point for the role or job profiles. There is no clear articulation of the scope of the role, how it differs from others at the same level or what progression looks like.
The manager knows the employee is contributing more. Reward wants to ensure fairness and consistency. Talent teams want development pathways to be transparent. Yet without a clear job profile that defines the role's purpose, accountabilities, and required skills and proficiency levels, everyone is working with incomplete information. Decisions become subjective and the process becomes frustrating and slow.
The barrier is not performance; it is role clarity.
Many organisations are facing this challenge. Job profiles exist, but they have often been created at different points in time, in different formats and for different reasons. Now they are being asked to support far more:
When job profiles are unclear or inconsistent, all of these areas become harder, slower and less fair. When profiles are structured and connected within a job architecture, they create alignment and clarity.
Job profiles play a critical role in enabling transparent pay governance. A strong profile clarifies:
This allows Reward teams to:
Without this clarity, pay decisions can drift toward negotiation and subjectivity, increasing the risk of inequity.
Job profiles provide the foundation for visible, fair and motivating career pathways. Because profiles describe roles rather than individuals, they help employees and managers understand:
This creates transparency. Employees can see how to grow, managers have structure for development conversations and organisations can move talent more effectively, rather than relying heavily on external hiring.
When job profiles define roles in terms of outcomes and skill requirements, they provide a shared language for workforce planning. Organisations can:
This shifts workforce planning from being reactive to truly strategic.
Performance management only works when expectations are clear. Job profiles:
This reduces ambiguity and strengthens trust. Performance conversations become more meaningful, fair and forward-looking.
When job profiles are done well, they become part of the organisation’s everyday rhythm. They provide a shared understanding of how work is structured, how contribution is recognised and how careers progress. Reward has clarity, managers have better conversations and employees understand what is expected of them and how they can grow.
When profiles are inconsistent or static, these benefits fall away. Pay decisions are harder to justify, progression becomes unclear and internal mobility slows.
The real value comes when job profiles sit within a connected job architecture that is actively maintained. This allows organisations to balance flexibility with stability and support both individual development and organisational fairness.
How RoleMapper Helps: RoleCreate
RoleMapper enables organisations to build, maintain and govern job profiles in a structured, scalable and skills-aligned way.
With RoleCreate, you can:
RoleCreate turns job profiles from static documents into a live, governed framework supporting pay fairness, performance, internal mobility and future workforce readiness.
If you are moving towards skills, preparing for pay transparency or trying to strengthen internal mobility, your job profiles are the foundation.
The pace of change has never been greater, and the need for agility across the enterprise and job architecture is now business critical. In just three years, the average enterprise has experienced five major transformations, and most expect even more upheaval in the years ahead.
Yet, while the nature of work is evolving rapidly, the way organisations define that work has barely changed, at a time when organisations are shifting to a skills-based approach.
Traditionally, jobs were defined through static job descriptions, long lists of tasks describing what an individual was expected to do. In slower times, this approach worked. Roles remained relatively stable and these documents could sit unchanged for years.
But today, that static view of work is holding organisations back. Work, skills and technology are evolving constantly and many organisations are still relying on job data that no longer reflects the reality of what people actually do.
The real challenge is not just that job descriptions are outdated. It’s that most organisations have never properly deconstructed their jobs into the essential tasks and outcomes that make them up, or linked these to the skills and proficiency levels required.
When the pace of change accelerates, this lack of clarity creates risk. Without a solid understanding of work and skills, it’s impossible to plan effectively, redeploy talent or ensure fair and transparent pay.
Transitioning to a skills-based approach can help solve this. It provides the flexibility organisations need to adapt and thrive — but only if it’s built on a solid foundation. That foundation is a well-designed, well-governed job architecture.
A skills-based approach defines work by deconstructing jobs into critical tasks, outcomes and the skills and proficiency levels required to perform them.
It focuses less on where jobs and people sit within a business and more on understanding the work that needs to be done — across the whole organisation. The work is broken down into discrete segments and mapped to identifiable skill clusters.
When this process is done well, it creates visibility. Leaders can see which skills are needed where, employees can understand what’s expected of them and the organisation gains a dynamic picture of its capabilities.
Research by Deloitte found clear benefits of a skills-based approach both for organisational performance and employee experience.
Organisations that had embedded a skills-based model were:
According to Deloitte, 93% of business leaders recognise the importance of moving from a job-based to a skills-based model, yet just 20% say their organisation is equipped to deliver it.
From our experience working with clients making this transition, the main barrier is often a chaotic or inconsistent job architecture. A job architecture forms the building blocks of an organisation. It provides the framework upon which you can extract, align and manage how work and skills are distributed across the organisation.
A well-designed job architecture can play a crucial role in enabling a skills-based transition by:
When designed well, job architecture becomes more than an HR tool — it becomes the living DNA for work that enables both governance and flexibility.
Reviewing your organisation's job architecture framework can feel like a daunting prospect. We’ve worked with organisations that have spent more than 18 months completing this task manually. By the time they finish, the data is often out of date — and maintaining it becomes an even bigger challenge.
At RoleMapper, our proprietary AI and advanced Natural Language Processing help organisations transform and digitise their job data into best-in-class, inclusive job descriptions and a robust, future-focused job architecture and skills framework.
With a strong data foundation, organisations can evolve their job architecture from a static structure into a dynamic, living system — one that reflects the reality of how work is done and how it’s changing.
This connected data enables true workforce agility: supporting internal mobility, ensuring pay transparency and compliance and keeping skills strategies aligned with business needs.
A skills-based approach offers huge potential — but only if it’s grounded in an accurate understanding of work. You can’t transform skills without first transforming the data that defines jobs, levels and work.
Job architecture is not just a structural exercise; it’s the strategic infrastructure that makes workforce transformation possible.
When organisations build this foundation — structured yet dynamic, governed yet flexible — they create the conditions to thrive in an era where change is the only constant.
A manager is trying to recognise a high performer. The individual has taken on broader responsibilities, is mentoring others and is clearly operating at a higher level. However, when the manager presents this to Reward, the conversation stalls because there is no shared reference point for the role. There is no clear articulation of the scope, no job profiles, or an outline of how the role differs from others at the same level or what progression looks like.
The manager knows the employee is contributing more. Reward wants to ensure fairness and consistency. Talent teams want development pathways to be transparent. Yet, without a clear job profile that defines the role's purpose, accountabilities, and the required skills and proficiency levels, everyone is working with incomplete information. Decisions become subjective and the process becomes frustrating and slow.
The barrier is not performance; it is role clarity.
Many organisations are facing this challenge. Job profiles exist but they have often been created at different points in time, in different formats and for different reasons. Now they are being asked to support far more:
When job profiles are unclear or inconsistent, all of these areas become harder, slower and less fair. When profiles are structured and connected within a job architecture, they create alignment and clarity.
Job profiles play a critical role in enabling transparent pay governance. A strong profile clarifies:
This allows Reward teams to:
Without this clarity, pay decisions can drift toward negotiation and subjectivity, increasing the risk of inequity.
Job profiles provide the foundation for visible, fair and motivating career pathways. Because profiles describe roles rather than individuals, they help employees and managers understand:
This creates transparency. Employees can see how to grow, managers have structure for development conversations and organisations can move talent more effectively, rather than relying heavily on external hiring.
When job profiles define roles in terms of outcomes and skill requirements, they provide a shared language for workforce planning. Organisations can:
This shifts workforce planning from being reactive to truly strategic.
Performance management only works when expectations are clear. Job profiles:
This reduces ambiguity and strengthens trust. Performance conversations become more meaningful, fair and forward-looking.
Job profiles done well mean they become part of the organisation’s everyday rhythm. They provide a shared understanding of how work is structured, how contributions are recognised, and how careers progress. Reward has clarity, managers have better conversations and employees understand what is expected of them and how they can grow.
When job profiles are inconsistent or stagnant, these benefits tend to diminish. Meaning pay decisions are more complex to justify, progression becomes unclear, and internal mobility slows.
The real value lies in job profiles that are part of a connected job architecture actively maintained. This allows organisations to balance flexibility with stability, supporting both individual development and organisational fairness.
RoleCreate enables organisations to build, maintain and govern job profiles in a structured, scalable and skills-aligned way.
With RoleCreate, you can:
RoleCreate turns job profiles from static documents into a live, governed framework supporting pay fairness, performance, internal mobility and future workforce readiness.
Ready to make your job profiles work harder?
If you are moving towards skills, preparing for pay transparency or trying to strengthen internal mobility, your job profiles are the foundation.
Job levelling and job evaluation are often used as if they mean the same thing, but they don’t. Both deal with how work is structured and rewarded, yet they serve very different purposes.
The confusion matters. As organisations face pressure to ensure fair pay, transparency and agility, understanding the difference between levelling and evaluation is critical. Levelling defines the structure of work — how roles relate and progress. Evaluation defines value — how roles compare in terms of worth and pay.
Getting the distinction between job levelling and job evaluation right is what allows HR and Reward teams to build frameworks that are fair, scalable and compliant in a fast-changing world of work.
Many job structures in use today were built for a very different world of work — one with fixed hierarchies, clear functional boundaries and long-term roles. However, as business models evolve and skills become more fluid, those rigid frameworks struggle to keep pace.
Employees expect fairness and transparency in how jobs are defined and paid and new regulations such as the EU Pay Transparency Directive are raising the bar on how employers demonstrate equal pay for equal work. To meet these expectations, organisations need strong foundations that connect the structure of jobs (levelling) with the value of work (evaluation).
Job levelling is the process of defining a consistent framework that describes how roles relate to one another in terms of scope, complexity, accountability and impact.
It creates the structure and shared language that underpin career progression, pay decisions and organisational design. A clear levelling framework answers questions like:
Job levelling brings coherence to the organisation. It helps leaders make fairer pay and progression decisions, supports internal mobility and ensures that people understand where their role sits within the wider structure.
Done well, job levelling doesn’t just add structure — it enables agility. It gives leaders and employees a transparent, skills-focused view of how work connects and how people can grow.
Job evaluation, by contrast, is about assessing the relative value of different roles to determine their place within a pay structure.
Where levelling defines the structure, evaluation provides the measurement. It asks:
Job evaluation frameworks — such as Hay, Mercer IPE, or Towers Watson’s Global Grading System — apply consistent criteria to measure factors like knowledge, problem-solving and accountability.
Organisations often use job evaluation to uncover pay inequities hidden behind similar job titles. Two roles might look identical on paper but vary significantly in scope or decision-making. Evaluation helps make those distinctions visible, supporting fair and defensible pay outcomes.
Evaluation brings objectivity and governance to reward decisions — an increasingly critical factor as transparency expectations rise.
While distinct, job levelling and job evaluation are most effective when connected.
Think of job levelling as building the architecture of a house and job evaluation as assessing the value of each room. Levelling ensures consistency and design integrity; evaluation ensures fairness and market alignment.
Without levelling, evaluation data can feel disconnected from how work is actually done. Without evaluation, levelling lacks the rigour that links structure to pay and performance.
Confusing levelling and evaluation is a common problem. Some organisations treat them as one and the same or introduce frameworks without clear governance. This often leads to duplication, inconsistency and frustration.
Typical challenges include:
As organisations transition to skills-based models, so too are levelling and evaluation. Levelling frameworks are increasingly used to map skills, capabilities and proficiency levels, not just responsibilities. Evaluation data is being combined with skills-based pay and market insights to create a more dynamic view of workforce value.
This convergence enables a deeper understanding of how work is evolving — connecting the structure of jobs, the skills people bring and the value they create.
A dynamic job architecture that integrates levelling, evaluation and skills data becomes the foundation for fairness, agility and growth.
Job levelling and job evaluation serve different purposes, but together they provide the clarity and consistency modern organisations need.
Levelling defines the structure of work; evaluation defines its value. Both are essential for fairness, transparency and agility in the new world of work.
Get started: Discover how RoleMapper helps organisations build dynamic job frameworks that connect job data, levels and skills to drive fairness, agility and growth.
When job data lives in multiple systems and titles multiply, organisations lose visibility of how work is structured. Pay, progression and governance become harder to manage, and decisions start to rely on outdated assumptions. A clear, governed job architecture provides a single, reliable view of roles, levels and skills and a framework that supports fairness, agility and compliance.
Before you start, define why you’re doing this. Common drivers include improving levelling and pay alignment, preparing for pay transparency legislation or building clearer career paths. Setting priorities early helps you balance speed with rigour. A job architecture only succeeds when it directly supports organisational goals.
Bring all job codes, titles and descriptions into one place. Expect duplication, inconsistent naming and missing information. The goal at this stage is visibility, not perfection. If job descriptions are outdated, use recent postings or summaries to capture what people actually do today. Once you can see the data clearly, patterns start to emerge.
Connect job data to employee data to see how people are distributed across roles. This reveals where one title encompasses multiple types of work or where similar jobs are found in different areas. Mapping people early highlights duplication and shows where roles or career paths need realignment.
Look for similarities in work, outcomes and skills. In most organisations, a few broad capability areas repeat across teams — such as data, engineering or customer roles. These become your core job families. Group by work and skills, not by reporting lines. Job architecture should describe what people do, not who they report to.
Decide on a clear framework that shows how roles connect and progress. Most organisations work well with three layers — broad family groups at the top, individual job families beneath them and specific profile titles within each family. Only add extra layers if your organisation is large or complex enough to need them. The aim is to make your structure simple to navigate and easy to maintain as you grow.
Your levelling framework underpins everything from pay to progression. Define levels based on scope, impact and complexity, not on tenure. Test your criteria with real roles to check consistency. When people reach the same conclusion independently, your levels work.
Job titles carry meaning, but inconsistency undermines fairness. Develop naming rules that describe the work and show the level, while keeping variations to a minimum. Standard titles make it easier to compare roles, benchmark against the market and support pay transparency.
Describe each role through key work and skills required for success. Use clear, inclusive language. Linking profiles to structured skills data creates alignment across recruitment, learning, workforce planning and reward — and gives you a foundation for skills-based talent management.
Bring together experts and leaders from different functions to review and test your model. Keep discussions focused on whether the structure reflects real work and skills, not naming preferences. Make the process collaborative, transparent and time-bound. Involving teams early creates ownership and keeps momentum.
The fastest way for job architecture to unravel is through uncontrolled change. Put in simple governance from the start. Define who can create, edit and approve roles, track version history and monitor title growth. A well-governed framework should feel dynamic but controlled — evolving with your organisation without losing consistency.
Strong job architecture management helps align pay with value, links skills to strategy, and creates clear progression paths. It supports equity and compliance while giving leaders the clarity to make faster, fairer decisions. Done well, it becomes a living system that keeps pace with change instead of holding it back.
Building and maintaining job architecture doesn’t have to take years of spreadsheets and workshops. RoleMapper’s AI-powered job architecture software helps you consolidate job data, design families and levels, standardise titles and automate governance — all in one workspace.
If you’re ready to move from complexity to clarity, book a demo or get in touch to see how RoleMapper can help.
At this year's Unleash World, our CEO, Sara Hill, delivered a talk to HR and People leaders on the future of workforce transformation. Instead of opening with AI, skills platforms or talent marketplaces, we began somewhere more foundational; the part of transformation that is often overlooked yet determines whether any of these strategies work in practice: the data that defines how work is structured, valued and enabled.
We highlighted the importance of having clarity around jobs, levels, work and skills. These elements may appear operational, but they are the underlying infrastructure behind almost every strategic workforce decision. If organisations want to introduce AI, build skills-based strategies, enable internal mobility, define performance standards, create meaningful career pathways or ensure fair and transparent pay, they need a shared, current and connected understanding of the work itself.
This key message we wanted to give organisations is that You cannot transform work if you cannot clearly describe the work.
The same foundation sits underneath many of the priorities that the HR leaders at Unleash are currently focused on:
This data is not administrative. It is both strategic and foundational.
The Challenge: Work Has Evolved Faster Than the Structures Describing It
Work is changing rapidly, AI is reshaping tasks, skills are shifting, teams are increasingly organised around projects and changing business priorities. Yet the organisational structures defining work have not kept up.
We consistently see:
This often results in organisations hiring externally for capability that already exists internally, simply because the data to surface and mobilise those skills is not in place.
The gap between how work is actually being done and how work is defined has become too large to ignore.
On one side, organisations want greater agility, to move talent fluidly, support development and deploy skills where they are needed most. On the other, they require structure to ensure fairness, accountability and clear progression.
Both priorities are valid, both are necessary and critically, both rely on the same underlying data. The challenge is not choosing between flexibility and structure, it is creating the organisational DNA that supports both.
This is why job architecture is returning to strategic relevance. But the job architecture required today is not a static framework or set of job descriptions. It must operate as a living system - what we call the DNA of Work.
Your DNA for Work is the connected spine that links:
When this "DNA" is in place, organisations gain a shared language of work that leadership, HR and employees can align around. It introduces clarity where there was ambiguity and adaptability where there was rigidity.
This is the work we focus on at RoleMapper. We help organisations:
The result is a dynamic foundation: structured enough to ensure fairness, flexible enough to support transformation and resilient enough to adapt as business needs change.
Transformation does not start with technology. It starts with how work is defined. When organisations build their DNA for Work, the path to skills-based strategy, internal mobility, equitable pay and AI-enabled transformation becomes far more achievable.
Talk to one of our experts about how we can build the DNA for Work in your organisation.
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