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What is a job family? Why is it important? And what separates it from a job function? Let’s dive in for some answers.
Job Family Definition
A job family includes roles with similar education, skills, training, or experience. So, what is the difference between job function and job family? A job family is a group of job functions.
Harvard defines a job family as:
“A group of jobs having the same nature of work (e.g., Accountant or HR Generalist) but requiring different levels of skill, responsibility, or working conditions (e.g., entry-level versus senior level). The job family may also be referred to as a specialty area.”
and they define job function as:
“A broad category of jobs (e.g., Finance or General Administration or Faculty & Student Services) which includes multiple job families. The job function may also be referred to as a profession.”
Employees working in a specific job family might not have all the same duties, but they work in the same department. For example, an Accountant and a Financial Auditor are 2 similar (but different) roles in the Finance and Accounting job family.
Note: Check out our blog on What is a Job Function? to learn more about job functions.
Why does a Job Family Matter?
Job families essentially provide an organization with a clearer categorization of their job architecture in shaping career streams and paths. Doing so also enables employers to inform employees about important aspects of their careers, potentially raising their overall workplace experience. Specifically, doing so leads to:
More equitable pay structures –
Employers can provide better salary benchmarking based on industry standards that follow similar job-family structures. These would enable employers to remove contentious salary inconsistencies across various dimensions such as region, seniority, and organizational specializations. In fact, workforce transparency through job families could make it easier for companies to fulfill quality company practices, as highlighted by the Department of Commerce and Department of Labor Good Jobs Principles. These also include discrimination-free recruitment, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA), and positive organizational cultures.
Transparent career progression –
Job families give candidates a roadmap for their professional development and long-term organizational prospects. As such, job families can provide individuals with the know-how needed to advance their positions. So, these include the soft skills, experience, and role-specific competencies needed for promotion to specific roles. The process also empowers HR in succession planning and future recruitment initiatives by shortlisting candidates with shared characteristics for thriving in a specific job domain.
Determining training and development needs –
A job family breakdown gives the company a better idea of the shared challenges and skill gaps across similar roles. In doing so, HR leaders can cost and time-effectively schedule group workshops and seminars for different roles within the organization. As such, leaders can also mobilize workforce planning by collectively driving different roles to acquire specific skill sets in anticipation of broader workforce demands.
Accommodating new roles –
Applying job families in the talent management process creates a certain level of flexibility when deciding on the career pathway and range of responsibilities of novel roles that could emerge as the company expands. So, these roles could appear to fulfill new business operations or manage growing teams. Also, job families enable employers to merge newly formed roles with the career paths of related roles within the organization.
Job Family — Examples
Job families might differ depending on which industry you are in (e.g., Higher Education vs. Fintech). Here’s a typical job families list used across most sectors:
- Administration
- Design
- Facilities
- Finance and Accounting
- Human Resources
- Information Technology
- Legal
- Marketing
- Operations
- Sales
So, how might a job family framework look in IT, Hospitality, and Finance? Here are 3 examples:
IT Job Families
The University of Tennesse system has a dedicated page for each job family. Their IT job family is made up of the 3 roles below, each with its own job functions:
Hospitality Job Families
Here is a job families framework from the hospitality industry. So, at each job family level, there are different roles. These roles might have similar duties, but they expand as a person moves up in the hierarchy:
| Hotel Management | Housekeeping | Catering |
|---|---|---|
| Hotel Manager | Head of Housekeeping | Head of Catering |
| Shift Manager | Housekeeping Supervisor | Catering Manager |
| Receptionist | Housekeeper | Catering Assistant |
| Porter | Room Attendant | Catering Intern |
Finance Job Families
The University of Wisconsin uses the chart below to outline their finance job families into sub-families (and sample jobs):
Differentiating Your Job Family From Other Role Categorization Terms
It is important to note that job families offer a general view of a job framework or structure. There are other aspects of a role that determine its exact placement in the spectrum and family tree of jobs.
For instance, the job function identifies the roles within the job family that have the most similar skills or specializations. These could also be similarities in career progression, overseas deployment, and training/development opportunities.
If an organization were to zoom in further into the details of a position, it would reveal the role at the job level.
The following simplified examples show each term applied to a specific career type.
Job Family: Marketing
Job Function: Digital Marketer
Job Level: Digital Marketing Manager
Job Family: Operations
Job Function: Quality Assurance
Job Level: Quality Control Specialist
Job Family: Human Resources
Job Function: Employee Relations
Job Level: Junior Employee Relations Specialist
The job function and level of a role are what employers and recruiters publish on a JD. So, these are the specific requirements for hiring candidates with the skills, training, and experience that match a role.
It is also important to note that job level comprises more than a person’s seniority or academic qualifications, but also, their soft skills and workplace competencies, which are critical for advancing company goals.
Considering the dynamism of workplace roles and ever-shifting demands based on industry trends, there is always a risk of HR getting muddled with job descriptions and accidentally attracting talent misaligned with the job fit.
That’s why talent acquisition teams and HR decision-makers (especially so at the enterprise level, due to the sheer number of roles/vacancies involved for organizational success) must turn to a reliable tool for standardizing job families and providing a detailed breakdown of roles and their relationships with the rest of the organization.
What is a Job Family Matrix?
A job family matrix is a helpful tool to organize information about different roles in a job family. Items to list in a job family matrix include:
- job title
- job code
- department
- salary/pay grade
- exempt/non-exempt status
- job summary
- core duties
- basic qualifications
- preferred skills or qualifications
- required certifications or licenses
- essential physical requirements
- working conditions
Here are 2 examples of a job family matrix template:
Harvard University’s HR Compensation – Professional job family matrix is in PDF format. But you can use it as a guide to create your own:
This job family matrix template from PDFfiller is downloadable, so you can make edits:
Challenges and Solutions in Defining a Job Family
Addressing Ambiguity in Job Role Definitions
One of the most common challenges in defining job families is dealing with unclear job roles. For example, roles in technical support may vary greatly depending on the level of responsibility and the nature of the work. So, this can make it hard to create a consistent role profile across different job families.
The best solution is to start with the definition of a job family. So, this involves identifying the specific skills, daily operations, and the majority of time spent on similar work. Using data analysis and job evaluation tools can also help clarify each role’s purpose. The U.S. Department of Labor also provides helpful guidelines to further refine role profiles and ensure compliance with applicable laws.
Handling Overlapping Responsibilities Across Families
Another challenge is overlapping responsibilities between different job families. For example, tasks related to strategic planning may appear in both a job group focused on business intelligence and one that prioritizes training administration. So, this overlap can cause confusion for employees and their direct reports.
To resolve this, organizations should focus on building blocks that define clear career ladders and career streams. A job family lead can also help establish boundaries between job profiles while ensuring strategic goals are met. It’s also essential to consider the career goals and responsibilities of employees when assigning tasks. Therefore, by following best practices and aligning job responsibilities with career levels, organizations can minimize conflicts.
Implementing Job Families Effectively
The implementation of job families requires collaboration and careful planning. So, it’s important to align the career development framework with advanced education and training opportunities. Additionally, including benefits administration as part of the job family group ensures that employees at all career levels feel supported.
So, by addressing these challenges, you can create a structure where roles across common vocations and technical disciplines are clearly defined. Thus, fostering career advancement and aligning with business needs.
Best Practices for Using Job Families in Workforce Planning
To maximize the benefits of job families, follow these best practices:
- Use clear and consistent job profiles to outline the responsibilities of employees within each family.
- Ensure alignment between job families and organizational strategic goals.
- Regularly review and update the structure to reflect changes in the nature of the work or technical discipline.
- Promote collaboration between job family leads and HR to support initiatives like career development and benefits administration.
- Adopt tools and frameworks, such as those available under Creative Commons Attribution or international licenses, to standardize practices across locations or industries.
Disclaimers About JDs Built Solely Upon Job Families
While job families provide insightful perspectives on an employee’s career lifecycle, it is important to avoid relying on them when crafting JDs for several reasons, including the complexities of each role and how they could overlap.
Focusing on job families for your JD strategy presents talent management risks such as:
- Hindering cross-functional or cross-discipline career progression – Employees may feel tied down to a particular job family and resist learning and career growth opportunities that emerge in other disciplines/departments.
- Reducing the effectiveness of JDs – The most dynamic and impactful JDs should echo the uniqueness of a particular role. So, a JD that sticks with the systematic structure/traits of a job family could result in cliched or generic descriptions that turn away top talent seeking unique positions that present novel work experiences.
- Leading to long-term disengagement – There’s one old but gold phrase that has emerged in many strategic organizational meetings: expectations vs reality. And this could well apply to JDs entrenched in job family structure guidelines. Hires may gradually realize that the dynamism at the workplace leads to inaccuracies within the pitched JD and the ensuing discussions at the interview. These misleading JDs could ultimately cause employee dissatisfaction, disengagement, and increased turnover.
Refining Your JDs With AI
Despite all the risks (it is all about moderating the process!), job families ultimately facilitate the tedious and stressful responsibility of sorting roles into their respective places.
Through well-established job families, HR teams no longer need to worry about hiring the right people for emerging job titles like Metaverse Research Scientist or Cybersecurity Threat Attribution Analyst.
As such, job families are great starting points for JD-building – a process you could significantly enhance through the power of AI.
Ongig’s Text Analyzer platform eliminates the guesswork in JD-crafting by generating impactful content according to the latest employee trends and job market practices.
Through Text Analyzer, you can confidently create optimized descriptions at scale based on job family, job function, and job level. As such, our AI-guided platform can help advance an enterprise’s inclusive hiring efforts, such as ensuring equal pay grades from the get-go of recruitment.
Our AI-supported platform even includes configurable smart templates that you can quickly apply and repurpose according to your talent acquisition objectives!
WHY I WROTE THIS?
At Ongig, we love everything related to job descriptions. This includes job families that are the foundation for writing job postings. So, check out our Text Analyzer software if you need help creating clear, consistent JDs (that are bias-free).
Sources
- Harvard University Job Functions and Families
- Job Families (by DePaul HR)
- Five ways in which job families can create HR harmony (by Paydata)
- Job Family definition (by Law Insider)
- List of Job Families (Duke University HR)
- 04.23.2003 – SISC making progress on new job structure (berkeley.edu) (by Berkeley University)
- Job Families Handout (by University of Wisconsin)
- IT Job Families (by University of Tennessee)
- Business Administrator Job Family Matrix (by PDFfiller)
- HR Compensation Matrix (by Harvard University)
