Workforce and future skills
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10 min read
Key findings
Architecture defines internal relationships among jobs and pay structure aligns them with market values, so bands drawn first rest on matching by title.
Directive (EU) 2023/970 set 7 June 2026 for national laws, and by 23 September one tracker showed five of 27 states fully transposed.
The directive builds reporting, pay requests and joint assessments on categories of workers, which must be grouped in a non-arbitrary manner on objective criteria.
A SHRM contributor reported one Specialist title held by 435 employees across 24 pay grades in a reclassification of nearly 1,000 job codes.
A fortnight per family produces placement and a list of misfits, which is enough for a pay review to proceed.
A reclassification of nearly 1,000 job codes found a single Specialist title held by 435 employees across 24 pay grades.
Job architecture is the structure of job families, levels and titles that pay ranges, career paths and workforce plans depend on.
It comes before pay bands because a band needs a level to attach to. Directive (EU) 2023/970 also expects pay structures that compare the value of work on objective, gender-neutral criteria.
Two units call the same work by different titles. Three titles cover work that differs only by grade. A fourth exists because one person negotiated it.
A pay review then asks for internal equity, and the reward team cannot produce it.
Nothing sits under the titles to be equitable about.
The sections below cover the build order, the directive and national law, and the conversation with the leader who wants bands first.
What Job Architecture Contains
Four components make up the structure.
Job families and sub-families, which group roles that share work
Levels, which describe accountability in observable terms
Titles, which name the job inside and outside the organisation
Job profiles, which record the purpose and accountabilities of each role
Reiman and Pontious of WorldatWork, writing in October 2025, separate two layers that organisations often confuse.
Architecture defines the internal relationships among jobs.
The compensation structure aligns those jobs with external market values.
They also concede that rigorous research on the financial value of job architecture is scarce.
The case for building one therefore rests on risk, time and comparability, and a return figure would be invented.
Architecture And Pay Bands
A level is an internal rank, defined by what the person is accountable for.
A pay band is a range of pay attached to a level, using external market data.
Drawing bands first forces the reward team to match each job to a market survey by title.
Titles are where the inconsistency sits, so the band looks precise and rests on a guess about what each title covers.
Ingham, in the ATD Talent Management Handbook, notes that employers use job evaluation less than they once did.
Many progress people within broad bands for each job family instead.
Either route needs the families and levels to exist first.
Five Processes That Rely On Architecture
Five processes assume a workable architecture and degrade without one.
Pay ranges and any claim of internal equity
Career paths, and whether anyone can see one
Workforce planning, which needs comparable units
Skills work, which needs somewhere to attach
Span and structure analysis, which needs consistent levels
Functions that attempt any of the five first usually discover the gap halfway through and stop.
What The Directive Requires
Directive (EU) 2023/970 was signed on 10 May 2023.
Article 34 sets 7 June 2026 as the date for member states to bring in the laws to comply.
The directive binds member states, so an employer's duties are those of the national law that implements it.
Several provisions turn on how work is grouped and valued.
Article 4 requires pay structures that show whether workers are comparable, on objective criteria including skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions
Article 5 gives applicants the pay or its range, bars questions about pay history, and requires gender-neutral job titles
Article 6 requires easily accessible criteria for pay, pay levels and pay progression
Article 7 gives workers, within two months, their own pay level and average pay by sex for comparable work
Article 9 sets pay gap reporting by category of workers, from 7 June 2027 for 150 or more workers
Article 10 requires a joint pay assessment where an unjustified gap of at least 5 per cent appears in a category
Article 9 reaches employers with 100 to 149 workers from 7 June 2031.
Article 3 defines a category of workers as people doing the same work or work of equal value, grouped in a non-arbitrary manner.
An employer without families and levels will struggle to show that its categories of workers are grouped in a non-arbitrary manner.
Article 4 names job evaluation and classification systems as tools that member states must make available.
Its text names no scheme that an employer must use.
Where Transposition Varies
The directive reaches employers through national law, and national law has arrived unevenly.
Lockton's tracker, published on 25 September 2026 with status at 23 September, listed five member states as fully transposed.
Those were Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Malta and Slovakia.
Estonia and Poland were partial, and twenty had not transposed.
The Netherlands targets 1 January 2027, and France sent a revised draft to its Council of Ministers on 10 September 2026.
Germany had a draft that was not yet published.
Sweden announced on 26 March 2026 that it was seeking postponement.
Trackers classify partial and full transposition differently, so the national gazette settles any specific case.
In the United States, Washington requires a wage scale or salary range in each posting from employers with 15 or more employees.
New York requires the compensation or its range in advertisements for jobs, promotions and transfers from employers with four or more employees.
Other states and cities have their own rules, so each location needs a check against its own statute.
A posted range, or an answer to a worker's request, presupposes that the job has a level.
An employer operating in several countries needs one architecture that answers the category question everywhere, with national detail added on top.
Titles And Levels
The confusion that produces most of the mess is treating a title as a statement of level.
Titles are given for recognition, for signalling to customers, and to settle a negotiation nobody wanted to lose.
A SHRM contributor article of 28 April 2026, by Wayne Birch of Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, shows the scale.
A reclassification of nearly 1,000 job codes found a single Specialist title held by 435 employees across 24 pay grades.
The author calls this a systemic pay equity risk that a manual audit would have missed.
Article 5 of the directive requires gender-neutral job titles, which puts the title list in scope as well.
What Separates One Level From Another
Job levelling rests on accountability, and levels should differ in something observable.
Four things separate levels, and scope is only one of them.
The decisions a person takes without asking
The time horizon they work to
Whether they are accountable for others' work
The ambiguity they resolve rather than escalate
Clark, in the same ATD handbook, describes the leadership pipeline model of Charan, Drotter and Noel.
Each level in that model is a different job.
Each passage between levels requires shifts in skill requirements, time applications and work values.
A weak descriptor reads "manages complex projects with significant impact".
A usable one reads "takes scope and sequencing decisions on projects running over two or more quarters, and is accountable for two to four others".
Two assessors reading the second should look for the same evidence, the test set out in rebuilding a competency framework around the work.
The number of levels is the number of step changes that can be told apart on evidence.
Two adjacent levels that cannot be separated should merge.
An employer without families and levels will struggle to show that its categories of workers are grouped in a non-arbitrary manner.
The Fortnight Per Family
A full architecture project takes a year, and most organisations need less than that to run a pay review.
Take an imagined finance function of 140 people with 47 titles, where the Reward Lead and an HR business partner have a fortnight.
On days one and two, the HR business partner lists every title with its headcount, grade and manager
On days three to five, the Reward Lead and two finance managers group the titles by the work
On days six to eight, the same three name the levels that differ in accountability
On day nine, each title is placed at a level and anything that will not fit is flagged
On day ten, the misfits go to the manager who created them
The fifth step produces the value and the argument.
Anything the grouping cannot place is a legacy title, a role that needs redefining, or a person promoted in title rather than in work.
Three depths of answer exist, and the practitioner should say which one the timeline buys.
A fortnight per family produces placement and a list of misfits, enough for a pay review to proceed.
A quarter produces levels with written descriptors, enough to defend a decision.
A year produces families, levels, titles and career paths, enough to run everything else from.
David Wilkins of TalentNeuron, quoted by Edwards, calls global skills, job architecture and workforce planning in one go unworkable.
He advises starting with a sliver of the business, proving value and replicating, which is the case for one family first.
Families And Misfits
A family groups roles that share the work, the capability and the career movement between them.
Families drawn around the organisation chart dissolve at the next restructure.
Families drawn too finely number forty and give no comparability.
The test is whether someone could move between two roles in a family with development rather than retraining.
The misfits that will not place divide into four types.
Legacy titles nobody has retired
Hybrid roles built around one person
Inflated titles given instead of pay
Genuinely novel roles the structure predates
The third is the most sensitive and the most common.
A title given in place of money is a debt the organisation took on quietly, and the architecture exercise calls it in.
Handle those with the manager who made the promise, before publication, and never in a list circulated to managers.
The Conversation With The Business Leader
The request usually arrives as a stalled pay review, from a CFO or COO who wants bands.
Two conversations follow, one with the finance leader and one with the leader who wants a team levelled up.
The CFO asks why a market survey cannot simply be bought and bands set.
A survey prices jobs by matching them, and the match is made by title.
A matching error then appears in a pay review or, under the directive, in a report or a worker's request.
The ask to finance is small.
It is a fortnight for one family and a named finance partner in the grouping session.
No return figure exists, so the case rests on named risks and the hours the reward team spends matching titles by hand each cycle.
The structure for that case is set out in a business case that finance accepts.
The failure pattern is a leader who wants the team placed higher before the bands are published.
Descriptors are agreed and frozen before any names are placed, and that sequence is the defence.
Leaders see the criteria before they see the result for their own people.
Edwards records a practitioner whose second attempt at workforce planning was job families and critical role exercises that annoyed everyone.
Leaders in that account put in effort and got nothing back.
The fortnight should therefore end with each leader holding something to use, such as a role placed at a level in an afternoon.
Three objections arrive in every architecture conversation.
This will constrain how I run my area. It constrains titles rather than work, and it makes movement between areas possible
My people will see they are at the same level as another team. They already suspect it, and a published structure replaces the suspicion with criteria
We are too fast-moving for this. Fast-moving organisations create titles faster, so they reach the equity problem sooner
Publishing Levels And Ranges
The decision that causes the most anxiety is how much to publish.
Publish nothing, and career paths stay invisible, which is the complaint that started the work
Publish levels and descriptors without pay, which answers the path question and defers the equity one
Publish levels with pay ranges, which answers both and requires defensible ranges
Most organisations should take the middle position and say when the third will follow.
Where a law requires ranges, the third position arrives regardless.
Article 5 of the directive does this for applicants, and the Washington and New York statutes do it for postings.
The levels have to be ready before then.
Keeping The Architecture Current
Architecture decays the moment hiring resumes, because every new role is an opportunity to invent a title.
Three controls hold it without a governance board.
New titles come from the existing list, and an exception needs a named approver
Every new role is placed at creation rather than at the next review
One family is reviewed each quarter on a rota
The first control does most of the work and costs one line in the requisition process.
A year later, three tests show whether the architecture works.
A manager can place a new role without asking HR
A person can describe the next two steps in their path
Reward can answer an equity question from the structure
The first test is the cheapest, and it takes three managers and one real role description to run.
Where The Tools Sit
Trusted Talent Advisor holds the capability architecture and role definition work in component 01, The Core Practitioner Guide.
The conversation with a manager about an inflated title is in component 02, The Stakeholder Conversation Toolkit.
Its Talent Template Pack includes the role specification and the capability gap analysis.
Related reading: why mentoring programmes fail.
Sources
1. European Parliament and Council of the European Union. Directive (EU) 2023/970 of 10 May 2023 on strengthening equal pay for equal work or work of equal value through pay transparency and enforcement mechanisms. EUR-Lex.
2. Reiman, P. and Pontious, J. Structure, Definition, Clarity: The Business Case for Job Architecture. WorldatWork, Workspan Daily, 7 October 2025.
3. Birch, W. The AI Wasn't Wrong. Our Job Architecture Was. SHRM, 28 April 2026.
4. Lockton. EU Pay Transparency Directive: Implementation Status, alert of 25 September 2026. Lockton.
5. Ingham, J. Transforming Reward Into a Strategic Contributor to Talent Management, in Bickham, T. (ed.) ATD Talent Management Handbook. ATD Press.
6. Clark, L. Building a Leadership Development Strategy, citing Charan, R., Drotter, S. and Noel, J., in Bickham, T. (ed.) ATD Talent Management Handbook. ATD Press.
7. Edwards, D. The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook: Design, Implement and Measure Workforce Plans to Drive Business Results. Kogan Page.
8. Washington State Legislature. RCW 49.58.110, Disclosure of wage or salary range by employer. Revised Code of Washington.
9. New York State Senate. Labor Law section 194-B, Mandatory disclosure of compensation or range of compensation. Consolidated Laws of New York.
From the system
Trusted Talent Advisor sets out the full method: seven components, 51 tools, The Talent Template Pack and The Prompt Library.
See the system
Questions this answers
What is job architecture?
Job architecture is the structure of job families, levels and titles that organises roles in a company. Pay ranges, career paths, workforce planning and skills work all assume it exists, and it defines the internal relationships among jobs rather than their pay.
What is the difference between job architecture and a salary structure?
Job architecture defines the internal relationships among jobs through families, levels and titles. A salary structure attaches pay ranges to those levels using external market data. WorldatWork authors Reiman and Pontious draw the same line, so a salary structure depends on the architecture beneath it.
What comes first, job levels or pay bands?
Levels come first. A pay band is a range attached to a level, and without consistent levels the reward team matches jobs to market data by title, which is where the inconsistency sits. Write levels and descriptors for one family, then set ranges.
How do you build a job architecture from scratch?
Take one job family. List every title with headcount and grade, group the titles by the work, name levels that differ in decisions, horizon, accountability for others and ambiguity, place each title, and take the misfits to the manager who created them. A fortnight per family produces placement.
How many job levels should a company have?
As many as can be told apart on evidence. If two assessors cannot place a person at level 3 rather than level 4 from the written descriptors, merge the levels. Larger organisations need more levels, and the test applies at any size.
Do you need a job architecture for pay transparency?
Directive (EU) 2023/970 requires pay structures and categories of workers grouped on objective, gender-neutral criteria. Employers need jobs grouped consistently to meet those rules, which a job architecture is built to supply. National law decides the detail, and transposition varies by country.
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