Building Your Job Architecture: Why 2025 Is the Year to Act!

If you’re an HR professional in the European Union, you can no longer delay the inevitable: in 2025 you must prepare to implement the Pay Transparency Directive requirements. But don’t worry, I’ll continue to help you get there and answer questions!

This week, I was asked a couple of questions about the “equal pay for equal work” requirement: How do you define what qualifies as “equal work”? And what is the scope—does it apply to a team, a department, or the entire company? The key to answering these questions lies in establishing a solid job architecture.

What exactly is a job architecture?

Think of the job architecture as the blueprint for your organization. It provides a structured framework to organize and define jobs across your company. But it’s more than just a hierarchy. It also maps out how roles relate to one another, their relative value, and the skills and responsibilities they require.

The framework helps you clarify job expectations, ensure consistency, and establish fairness when evaluating and compensating roles. It’s not just about titles or pay grades; you create a shared understanding of what each position contributes to the organization and how those contributions align with business goals. It is the foundation for understanding and communicating the value of work across your organization.

Why do I need a job architecture for pay transparency?

A well-defined job architecture is the basis of pay transparency. If you don’t have one, how can you compare roles in an objective and consistent way? And explain that to your employees? To ensure equal pay for equal work, you need a clear framework that defines which jobs are genuinely equivalent. A solid job architecture allows you to:

• Identify Equivalent Roles: Pinpoint positions with similar levels of responsibility, skills, and impact across your organization.
• Enable Objective Comparisons: Evaluate jobs across departments or teams using standardized criteria.
• Support Defensible Pay Decisions: Base compensation choices on a transparent, well-structured system that employees and regulators can understand.
• Ensure Compliance: Meet EU pay transparency requirements confidently by demonstrating fairness and consistency in your job evaluation process.

Where do I start?

When you work for a large organization, building a job architecture may seem complex. And it is, so please make sure you schedule enough time to do this. You will also need to incorporate feedback sessions (management, unions, works councils, etc). Expect a few iterations and fine tuning efforts before you are done.

No matter the size of your company, breaking it into manageable steps helps you simplify the process. Here’s how you get started:

1. Conduct a Job Analysis Begin by documenting the key responsibilities, required skills, and expected outcomes for each role. Do not focus on job titles—two roles with different names may have similar core duties or two roles with the same name might be completely different. Instead, prioritize understanding the actual work performed and its value to the organization.
2. Establish Job Levels Develop clear criteria to differentiate between job levels. Consider factors such as decision-making authority, expertise required, impact on business outcomes, people management responsibilities, budget oversight etc. This list is not exhaustive and you should determine the factors that are most suitable for your company.
3. Group Roles into Job Families Organize similar roles into job families based on their function or discipline. For example, all marketing positions might belong to one family, while finance roles belong to another. This grouping not only makes it easier to compare jobs but also highlights potential career paths within each family and across the organization.

I could write a chapter about each of the bullet points, so keep in mind that this is a concise overview to get you started (you can find a detailed approach in my book). Also, while defining your job architecture watch out for these challenges:

• Over-relying on titles: A “Senior Manager” in one department might have vastly different responsibilities than in another. Focus on the actual role content rather than titles.
• Ignoring soft skills: While technical skills are easier to measure, don’t forget to factor in critical soft skills like stakeholder management or problem-solving abilities.
• Making assumptions: Don’t assume roles are different just because they’re in different departments. A project manager in IT might have very similar core responsibilities to one in HR. (Which also means they should be paid equally…)

What tools are already available?

Fortunately, job architectures are nothing new. And there are many tools available to help you get started. Here are a few suggestions:

• For job descriptions, external tools can simplify standardization while templates ensure alignment with the broader job architecture.
• Competency frameworks offer predefined models to differentiate roles.
• Job evaluation systems, such as point-factor methods or market-pricing tools, provide a structured way to assess roles based on factors like skills, responsibilities, and impact. These tools help quantify job value objectively and reduce subjectivity.
• And check if you HR Suite can streamline the creation and management of job families and levels so you can organize it centrally and make it easily available to employees.

Time to get started!

I can’t stress this enough: it’s almost 2025! If your organization employs 150 people or more, it’s time to get started by establishing a solid job architecture. Don’t wait until compliance deadlines create unnecessary pressure and won’t leave you enough time to properly roll this out in the organization. Start building your framework now. It may seem like June 2027 (the reporting deadline) is far away, but keep in mind that you must report over 2026 data. And that’s only a year away…