Results of the US Mercer QuickPulse™ Survey: Job Architecture Edition

In 2024, with a more stable labor market in place, employers are likely to take on more strategic projects to build their infrastructure and support the workforce of the future. A priority that we expect to top the list - job architecture. For some companies, that might mean developing their first job architecture, while others may be tweaking their current architecture to better support their talent strategy.

Our recently conducted Mercer QuickPulse™ survey collected information from over 600 employers. We asked what job architecture they have in place and what they are looking to do, or not do, going forward. Below we will cover the highlights of the resulting report.

How prevalent is job architecture?

Most companies either have a job architecture in place (76%) or are planning to put one in place in the next year (21%). Just under two thirds have a consistent design across the organization, while the rest have some variation by geography or business unit.

There are some commonalities when it comes to the design of job architectures. Typically, they consist of job family, career stream, job sub-family, and career level. Specialization and skills are much less common (each about 25% of the time).

The career streams in organizations typically include Executive, Management/People Leader, Professional, Support, and Technical with differentiation in the number of levels aligned with each track. Upon review of the results, several Mercer consultants have noted that in practice and in working with clients, they see the technical track consist of seven levels or more, which allows for the technical individual contributor to parallel some of the people manager levels.

Top challenges with job architecture

With any system or process, there are bound to be challenges with governance. The top challenges reported include maintaining current and comprehensive job content and HR/managers selecting roles for desired outcomes — perhaps when looking for titles or a perceived level of importance or authority.

Most companies indicate that they do have job content/job descriptions supporting their architecture or they plan to have them soon, but 49% reported they may not be accurate. They include a variety of things in the job descriptions; commonly, job summary, educational requirements, and responsibility statements. Fewer organizations include things like the compensation range and time allocation.

A total of 68% of respondents reported that job titles are consistent across the organization or consistent with some exceptions.

The majority of companies indicated that Compensation/Total Rewards is responsible for job architecture design, maintenance of the job catalog, mapping of new/revised entities, and job or position titling. Job description ownership seems to be more varied, with some reporting Comp/TR, HR Business Partners, and Managers/Business.

Communicating job architecture

Companies are transparent with most elements of the job architecture for managers but less so for employees. Only 20% of respondents don’t share job architecture information with employees.

While it’s clear that HR understands the value of the architecture (just under 80%), a smaller percentage (51%) feels business leaders and managers understand the value of managing compensation and talent mobility. Only 27% feel that their managers understand how to use the job architecture to discuss career opportunities with employees.

Incorporating skills

98% of the companies that contributed to Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2024 are planning work redesign in 2024. Of course, that will not only require an understanding of what skills they have, but the new skills they will need. Certainly, companies will need to work on incorporating skills into their job architecture. From the responses to our survey, it seems they’re working on it.

Just under 30% of companies have linked skills to their job architecture. For some of those, it’s only for particular job families. Another 35% of respondents plan to link skills into their job architecture within the next 6 to 12 months.

For those who have linked skills to their job architecture, behavioral skills are most often aligned organization-wide or at the career stream or levels, while technical skills are linked at the job or career levels.

26% of respondents utilize a technology platform or plan to for maintaining their skill architecture. 32% utilize external skills data to define the skills for their organization.

Measuring the effectiveness

The two most prevalent ways companies monitor the effectiveness of their job architecture is through internal career mobility or any turnover/exit data related to internal career mobility. However, there’s something to be considered in whether the job architecture is being effectively communicated. If managers don’t understand how to use it effectively in conversations about talent mobility and career opportunities, there’s probably work to be done on education, communication, and change management.

Ready to get started building a job architecture for your organization?

As the world’s leading human resources consulting firm, we have vast experience working within all industries and around the globe to develop effective job architecture. Even more importantly, as a full-service firm, we excel in developing change management and communication plans to transform how your organization thinks about talent management.

Give us a call at 866-605-1031 or send us an email and we’d love to see how we can help you in building or re-working your organization’s job architecture.