How to Identify Strategic Job Families for Business Success

Looking to streamline HR processes and boost employee engagement? This in-depth guide explores how to effectively identify strategic job families within your organization and harness their potential.
identify strategic job families

In today’s competitive job market, both job seekers and hiring managers seek an edge. As an experienced consultant, I’ve seen firsthand how difficult it can be to manage talent acquisition and career progression. That’s why organizations are increasingly turning to strategic workforce planning—and a key element of this is to identify strategic job families.

Instead of viewing your workforce as a collection of individual jobs, categorize them into families based on shared skills, knowledge, and career paths. This approach can be transformative, bringing clarity, structure, and efficiency to many human resource functions.

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Table of Contents:

Understanding Job Families

Simply put, a job family is a grouping of jobs that share common characteristics. These characteristics often include similar job duties, required skills, knowledge areas, and potential career paths. For instance, a “Marketing” job family might include roles like Marketing Coordinator, Social Media Manager, Market Research Analyst, and Marketing Director.

Why are Job Families Important?

Imagine a large organization with hundreds of job titles. Trying to manage compensation, career development, and training programs for each individual job title would be a logistical nightmare. Job families simplify this process by grouping similar jobs based on skills required.

Think of it like organizing a library. Instead of having books scattered about in no particular order, you categorize them by genre, author, and subject matter. This makes it much easier for someone to find the book they’re looking for. Job families work in much the same way, by providing structure and organization to your workforce and creating a solid job structure.

Benefits of Identifying Strategic Job Families

Job families aren’t just about organization—they can have a tangible impact on your organization’s success. Some benefits include:

1. Streamlined HR Processes

Job families create a consistent framework for a wide range of HR services and activities—from job analysis and evaluation to compensation and benefits. Instead of creating separate systems and processes for hundreds of job titles, HR can develop standardized procedures for each job family, saving significant time and effort.

2. Effective Talent Management

Job families play a crucial role in attracting, developing, and retaining top talent. When you identify strategic job families, you gain a better understanding of the skills and competencies needed for success within your organization. This enables you to target your recruitment efforts, design training development programs, and develop clear career paths for your employees. It can also be very beneficial to employee relations as it lays out a clear path for career progression.

3. Enhanced Employee Engagement

Knowing where their role fits within the larger organization can increase employee engagement. Job families help employees see a clear path for professional growth and understand the skills and experiences they need to advance their careers. This transparency can increase employee satisfaction, motivation, and retention.

4. Improved Organizational Agility

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, organizations need to be agile and adapt quickly to new challenges. By using job families, organizations can easily identify individuals with transferable skills and deploy them where they are needed most, even across departments or business units.

Steps to Identify Strategic Job Families

While the process will vary based on factors like company size, industry, and organizational structure, the following steps can guide your approach:

1. Gather Job Data

Begin by compiling information on all existing job titles. Collect job descriptions, competency models if you have them, and any other relevant documents. The more information you have about each role, the easier it will be to group them into families. Tools like Role Mapper offer helpful solutions for organizing this information and can assist with facilities project management or general administration.

2. Analyze Job Content

Examine the collected job data, paying close attention to similarities and differences. What tasks and responsibilities do the roles share? What are the typical career progression pathways? Identifying patterns in job content is crucial for effective grouping.

3. Group Jobs Into Families

Based on the similarities identified during your analysis, start grouping jobs into families. You might find that using a combination of function, industry, or required skills will create logical families that align with your organization’s unique needs. Don’t worry if every role doesn’t fit perfectly—you can always refine your categories as you go. For example, you may have a facilities management job family, a technology solutions job family, a risk management job family, and a financial services job family.

4. Develop Job Family Descriptions

Just as you would write a compelling job description, you should also develop a description for each job family. This will summarize the key duties, knowledge, skills, and career progression opportunities associated with that group. These descriptions serve as helpful references for both your employees and the HR team. This is also a great opportunity to utilize any market data you’ve collected to ensure your job families are competitive.

5. Review and Refine

It is important to note that this process should not be done in a vacuum. Regularly seek feedback from stakeholders at all levels of your organization, including employees, managers, and senior leaders. They can offer valuable insights into the practical applications and potential challenges of the job families you’ve created. This is an important part of conducting comprehensive analysis on your job families. You can also work with your stakeholders to create a compensation structure, which would fall under the total rewards category.

FAQs About Identify Strategic Job Families

What is an example of a job family?

Job families are groups of job titles with similar characteristics or purpose. These typically represent various functional areas within an organization. Some examples of job families are Human Resources, Information Technology, Finance & Accounting, and Marketing & Communications. You could also have other job families like software applications or health education. A job in facilities operations would obviously fall under the Facilities job family.

What are job family groups?

Job family groups combine several related job families under one umbrella category. For example, “Professional Staff” might encompass the job families of Human Resources, Finance & Accounting, Legal, and Information Technology. Grouping related families allows organizations to manage and address broad workforce needs and trends across various but interconnected departments or functions. Another example of a job family group would be “Services,” which could be comprised of social work, health promotion, and faculty development.

Which of the following defines job families?

A job family is most accurately defined as a set of jobs that share similar characteristics and are grouped together based on those shared traits. Common characteristics defining job families include similar job functions, skillsets required, and career progression pathways.

Why are job families important?

Job families offer multiple benefits. Primarily, they simplify human resource management by categorizing a vast number of unique positions into broader families, making it easier to design streamlined processes like recruitment, compensation, training, and career development. They are also critically important to identifying key talent within an organization. Having well-defined job families that contribute to the university’s mission is extremely important for those in the university community, whether it be students or faculty and staff.

Conclusion

Organizations are continually evolving to navigate complex market dynamics and meet workforce challenges. Identifying strategic job families provides clarity, alignment, and structure in managing human resources, fostering efficiency, employee growth, and enhanced business performance. Remember that your job families contribute to the overall success of your organization, so it is important to make sure that your organization is legally compliant in all facets of the process, including managing your organization’s privacy policy.

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Lonnie Ayers

On a mission to help every job seeker find a job. Co-inventor of mapertunity, the most advanced graphical job search tool in existence. A 21st century tool for jobs and businesses.

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