Job Architecture: The backbone of talent agility 

Workforces are changing rapidly and becoming more digital and diverse. To remain competitive, companies need to re-think not only how they operate but also how they structure job hierarchies, define roles and responsibilities, reward systems, and career paths. All of this while delivering an outstanding employee experience to a workforce that increasingly demands greater mobility and flexibility in their careers.

A solid job architecture is the foundation for offering a seamless employee experience along the whole employee-life-cycle – including individual and targeted development and learning activities, transparent and sustainable career path and succession planning, as well as fair and effective compensation and total reward programmes. A job architecture is also a clear single source of truth around the people that make up the organisation and its workforce.

Job Architecture (JA) acts as strategic backbone connecting the entire HR ecosystem for a consistent Employee Experience that, ultimately, impacts the customer experience. JA helps you:

• Develop/align talent segments, job families, capabilities, and accountabilities across the organisation.
• Define critical experiences, knowledge, and skills necessary for career progression.
• Identify flexible career paths not only within functions but across adjacent businesses in the organisation.
• Empower managers to support employees through effective conversations to support careers.
• Empower employees to actively manage and ignite their careers and choices.

With JA maturity comes additional benefits to go deeper and wider in the HR lifecycle where it can support ambitions like learning and development, strategic workforce planning, mobility, open talent marketplace, and broader talent initiatives.

It helps organisations gain a comprehensive view of all employees and deploy a strategic approach to human resources management across the enterprise.

As a HR practitioner, the greatest value from job architecture are the insights that it provides around:

• Talent initiatives investment – e.g. leadership cohorts and offerings.
• Scarcity of critical capability and skill.
• Determining critical organisational skills investment and experiences – looking horizontally across the business, beyond the verticals.
• Decision-making about build, buy or borrow talent.
• Decision-making on the size and shape of the workforce.
• Understand the workforce agility.
• Reskilling opportunities.
• Support the development of career paths.

Quite simply, the benefits of what a solid job architecture can bring an organisation is immense and with Mercer’s Job Architecture Tool (JAT), we simplify the process for you. The Mercer JAT is an intuitive and easy to use tool that builds your framework step by step. It provides:

• Lean and easy access to data
• Online collaboration
• Real time validation
• User friendly interface
• Dynamic architecture that grows and changes as you do

In addition, you have unlimited access to our comprehensive job library and job descriptions with over 25,000 jobs to build your own job catalogue. The unique combination of tool and library offered by Mercer JAT enables you to easily manage, change and maintain your job architecture centrally. So whenever there are changes to your job architecture, you are ready to make them in just a couple of clicks.

Mercer JAT is purpose driven to support strategic workforce planners, learning and talent leads and the HRBP community with a flexible infrastructure that adds value in their roles.