Job architecture: how it is built and what a company must consider

A job architecture is the system that orders every position in an organisation into comparable families, levels and grades. It is neither an organisation chart nor a list of job descriptions: it is the structure that answers, with the same criteria for everyone, which job is equivalent to which, what level of responsibility it carries and which pay band it belongs to. Without it, every pay, promotion or title decision is taken case by case, and the exceptions end up being the rule.

The four pieces

• Job families and sub-families: group positions by the nature of the work (operations, commercial, finance, technology, people), not by organisational unit.
• Levels: steps of responsibility comparable across families, from operational support to executive, defined by explicit criteria.
• Grades or bands: the correspondence of each level with a pay range, fed by the salary benchmark.
• Levelling criteria: scope of responsibility, complexity of decisions, size and type of team, impact on results and knowledge required.

How it is built, in order

The order matters. Doing it backwards, starting from salaries, produces structures that justify what already exists instead of ordering it.

• 1. Inventory: every existing job, with its incumbents, reporting lines and real descriptions, not those of the last restructuring.
• 2. Families: group by content of the work. A marketing "head" and a plant "head" may sit at different levels although they share a title.
• 3. Levelling: apply the criteria to each job and calibrate across areas, with the executive committee present for borderline cases.
• 4. Market matching: each level is compared with the salary benchmark's peer group to set the bands.
• 5. Governance: who approves a new job, how a level is reviewed and how often the structure is updated.

What the company must consider before starting

• Pay transparency: more and more global groups require documented, objective pay criteria in every affiliate; the architecture is the basis of that documentation.
• Local regulation: in Peru, Law 30709 requires private employers to group jobs into a table of categories and functions using objective criteria; equal-pay principles are also law in Chile, Colombia and Mexico.
• Internal equity: similar jobs, similar pay, across teams, countries and genders. The architecture makes visible the differences that are explained with stories today.
• Scalability: a structure designed for one country must absorb an acquisition or a new subsidiary without being rebuilt.
• Careers: clear levels let each person see the next step and what is expected to get there.
• Titles: separating the external title (what the card says) from the internal level avoids negotiating hierarchy with words.

Frequent mistakes

The three we see most: levelling the person rather than the job, so that a good professional "raises" their position instead of being promoted; creating so many levels that the differences stop meaning anything; and publishing the architecture without a governance process, so that the exceptions return within six months.

A job architecture is not a one-off project. It is the base on which the salary benchmark, the benefits study and succession decisions can speak the same language.