Job Family

What a job family is

A job family (عائلة الوظائف) is a group of jobs within an organisation that share the nature of their work and the core knowledge and competencies that work requires, while differing from one another in level and in the scope of responsibility each job carries.

The definition fixes two things at once. It fixes what the jobs in a job family have in common, which is the kind of work and what that work demands of the person doing it. And it fixes what is allowed to vary between them, which is level and scope of responsibility. A group of jobs that shares a level but not the kind of work is not a job family, and neither is a group whose members share only a department.

An accountant, a senior accountant and an accounts manager belong to one job family: the work in all three jobs is of one kind, even though their levels differ. A payroll analyst and a recruitment specialist, by contrast, belong to different families, even when both of them sit in the same department.

What holds a job family together

What holds a job family together is the content of the work: the core tasks, the knowledge that supports those tasks, and the competencies through which performance in them shows. Each of those three elements describes the work itself rather than the way the organisation happens to label it, place it or pay for it. The following do not work as the common ground of a job family:

• The job title. It can change without any change in the work beneath it, and the same title can be given to two different kinds of work. A job family built on titles would move a renamed job into another family on paper while the work stayed where it was, and it would group two jobs that share a title even though their work differs.
• The position in the organisational structure. It shows where a job reports, not what the job does, and a single department can bring together work of very different natures. The payroll analyst and the recruitment specialist above are an instance of this.
• The pay level. It is a result that comes after jobs have been divided into families, not a basis for dividing them. Grouping jobs by what they are paid would take as its starting point a figure that the division into job families is meant to come before.

That is why job analysis comes before the job family. Grouping jobs on the basis of their content assumes that the content is known and documented, not inferred from the name of the job. Where the content of a job has not been analysed and written down, there is nothing for the grouping to rest on except the title, the department or the pay, and each of those has been set aside above.

A job family and the job level: two dimensions, not one

A job structure runs in two directions. The job family is horizontal: it says what kind of work a job is. The level is vertical: it says where the job stands, relative to other jobs, in relative value.

One term needs care here. In the job evaluation literature, job classification means placing a job at a level by matching it against descriptions prepared in advance. That is work on the vertical axis, not on the job family.

A job family does not determine a job’s level, and it does not determine its pay. Setting the relative value of a job is the work of job evaluation, and it is from job evaluation that levels and pay ranges are derived. The job family determines which jobs a given job is compared with; job evaluation determines where the job stands once that comparison has been made.

What a job family is used for

1. Building career paths. A clearly defined job family makes career pathing possible, because the next role within the family is known and its requirements are derived from the higher level in the same family.
2. Movement between job families. The division into job families shows which moves are close and which ones call for retraining, and internal mobility is built on that distinction. A move inside a family stays within one kind of work; a move between families crosses from one kind of work to another.
3. A competency framework that stays manageable. Competencies are described at the level of the job family rather than for each separate job. The framework then stays fit for use instead of growing with every job the organisation adds.
4. External comparison. The job family means that comparing a job with its counterpart outside the organisation becomes a comparison on the content of the work, not on the job title.
5. Reviewing pay. Examining pay differences within a single job family says more than examining them across the whole organisation. This makes the job family a practical way into internal pay equity.

How many job families are enough

There is no correct number of job families, but there are two wrong extremes. Too few job families gather widely different kinds of work under a single description, and the families lose their value for comparison, because the jobs set side by side within them are no longer of one kind. Too many job families end in a family for every job, and then nothing is left to be compared with anything else.

The practical test is a single question: can an employee move within this job family without full retraining? If the answer is no, the group is two job families, not one. And if moving between two job families costs nothing, the division has separated jobs that did not need to be separated. The test therefore runs in both directions: it can show where a family is too broad, and where two families are in fact one.

What undermines a job family structure

The first error is building the job families on the existing organisational structure. The division then becomes a copy of how the departments are arranged today. The first restructuring brings it down, because it was never built on the work in the first place: once the departments move, a division that mirrored them has nothing left underneath it.

The second error is leaving the division unreviewed. Jobs change without any announced decision: a new tool removes part of a job’s tasks, or a task moves to another department. When that happens, the content that placed a job in its family is no longer the content the job has. A job family structure that is not reviewed stays a description of an organisation that used to exist, and career paths and pay decisions continue to be built on it after it has stopped matching reality.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.