Job Families - the 6W - what? why? who? when? which? and where?
Job families provide a structured way to group roles by function and seniority, enabling consistent capability mapping, career development, and succession planning across the organization. This guide explores the 6 W – what job families are, why they matter, who should manage them, when they should be reviewed, which job families to use and where to fit them in your talent framework.
A Job Family is a way of providing organization and structure to the efforts of teams and individuals in the organization.
It is the grouping of related job roles that require similar types of knowledge, skills, and capabilities. Roles within a job family typically:
- Share a common discipline (e.g., Engineering, Finance, Allied Health)
- Vary by level of complexity, responsibility, and scope (e.g., Technician → Specialist → Manager)
- Enable the design of progressive career paths and logical individual development routes
Job families differ from job titles. While job titles reflect specific positions, job families represent the broader framework that organizes jobs with similar functions or expertise areas.
They are not the same as departments – for example in Healthcare departments often include staff from different job families – Nursing, Medicine, Allied Health, Administration.
In a well-structured system, job families underpin
- Job architecture
- Career pathing
- Capability frameworks
- Workforce analytics
- Succession planning
Why Job Families are important
Organizations use job families to gain clarity, consistency, and control over workforce planning, capability development, and career mobility. Here’s why they matter:
1. Clarity and Standardization
Job families allow consistent structuring of roles across departments and locations. They support standardized definitions for roles and their requirements, aiding transparency and fairness.
2. Streamlined Capability Management
They enable efficient mapping of capabilities across similar roles, reducing duplication and ensuring alignment with business needs.
3. Targeted Career Development
Career paths become clearer within and across families, supporting employee mobility and development planning.
4. Succession Planning
They highlight logical progressions and help identify talent pipelines based on capability, not just title.
5. Workforce Analytics
Grouping by job family facilitates analysis of workforce composition, capability gaps, and mobility patterns.
6. Support for Skills-Based Approaches
Job families form a backbone for skills-based talent practices, allowing capability profiling and gap identification at scale.
Who Should Use and Manage Job Families?
Executives and Business Leaders
• Use job families for strategic workforce planning and to ensure alignment of roles with organizational goals.
HR and OD Professionals
• Manage them to design capability frameworks, ensure consistent job definitions, and support L&D and succession efforts.
Line Managers
• Use job families to understand role expectations, assess performance, and guide employee development.
Employees
• Navigate internal opportunities and career pathways by exploring families relevant to their skills or aspirations.
Consulting Partners or Shared Services
• In decentralized models, job families help shared HR teams manage frameworks consistently across multiple business units.
When Should You Define or Revisit Job Families?
During Organizational Restructuring: To realign job roles and reporting structures.
When Creating or Revising a Capability Framework: To ensure structured mapping of capabilities to roles.
Before Rolling Out Career Pathways: To define logical progression routes and prerequisites.
When Implementing a Talent Management Platform: To organize jobs, capabilities, and assessments around logical groupings.
As Part of DEI and Pay Equity Initiatives: To ensure consistent evaluation criteria across similar roles.
Post-Merger or Acquisition: To harmonize role structures across entities.
Which Job Families Are Most Common?
The most frequently used job families often align with organizational functions. Examples include:
- Operations – Production, Logistics, Supply Chain
- Clinical – Medical, Nursing, Allied Health, Technicians
- IT – Software Development, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure
- Engineering- Mechanical, Electrical, Process Engineering
- HR – Talent Acquisition, L&D, HR Business Partners
- Finance – Accounting, Financial Analysis, Audit
- Sales & Marketing – Brand Management, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success,
- Governance – Risk Compliance, Sustainability, Quality Assurance, Legal
Job families can be broad or granular depending on organizational size and complexity. For example:
- A small company might have one “Engineering” family.
- A large enterprise may split this into “Systems Engineering,” “Design Engineering,” and “Project Engineering.”
Where to Manage Job Families in Centranum
Centranum provides purpose-built tools to define, structure, and manage job families across your organization:
- Create and maintain your job architecture, including families, levels, and specializations.
- Define capabilities, accountabilities, and typical pathways for each family.
Competency Requirements Mapping
- Assign core and technical capabilities at the job family level to ensure consistency across related roles.
- Inherit or customize requirements for specific jobs within a family.
- Use job families as the foundation for career path visualizations and succession pipelines.
- Analyze readiness and capability gaps within each family.
Filter dashboards and analytics by job family to track distribution, capability gaps, and development progress.
Our AI can suggest job family assignments for new or imported job roles based on descriptions, reducing admin time and ensuring consistency.