Verifying career ladders is an exercise that concerns the whole company. I recommend running it with the HR business partners concerned, before sharing it with the business, which will have to carry it.
Here are a few points for conducting this check.
Looking across
A career ladder belongs to a job family. Within the same family, finance for example, several ladders coexist: accounting, controlling, accounts payable, and others still. And an employee compares, inevitably, their progression to that of the neighbouring ladders.
In this same logic, the first observation is comparative: it checks that the ladders hold together relative to one another. It is done at two scales.
Within the same job family first. Are the entry points and the tops of neighbouring ladders aligned, and their gaps explainable?
At the scale of the whole company next. There is one or several functions at the lowest level, and one or several functions at the highest level, across all jobs and all families. These are realities to be owned, with what they carry for the people concerned: knowing you are at the bottom of the structure, or no longer seeing possible progression. An honest architecture does not hide these two extremes: it recognises them, and it has anticipated them.
Targeting the check points
This second analysis is within a ladder. Verifying ladders is not necessarily reassessing everything, function by function. It is checking a few concrete and revealing points.
The entry and exit functions. This time you look at each ladder in itself. Is the ladder's entry point at the right level? Does its top really represent the culmination of the job within the company, in coherence with the various levels of leadership? When one of these two levels, the entry or the top, is very sparsely occupied, this raises a question: does it make sense to open at this level, or to close at this level, when it is so sparsely occupied?
The progression markers. Certain responsibilities appear as one moves up a ladder: responsibility for reporting, continuous improvement, audit, mentoring. These are good indicators. You look, for each, at which level it sits. If the responsibility for responding to audits appears at a certain level in one ladder, and two levels higher in a neighbouring ladder, this is a gap that must have been thought through. These few points are enough to reveal whether the whole holds together.
Making the bridges visible
Verifying ladders is not only about checking their internal consistency. It is also about making the possible paths visible.
A ladder says how far an employee can progress in their job. But it also says where this job ends, and where the possibility begins to move into a neighbouring ladder, or even into another family. The employee who reaches the top of their ladder is not necessarily at the end of their path: they are only if no bridge has been thought through. Thinking ladders across means also thinking about these bridges, and thereby allowing employees to remain engaged throughout their journeys.
Drawing on proven groupings
A final concrete pointer. Remuneration surveys, when they do not have enough data on a function, group together neighbouring job families, for example legal, tax and compliance.
These groupings are the result of observing many organisations. They are not a model to copy, since an architecture is built starting from the company itself. They do however offer a useful pointer for choosing the ladders to compare together, beyond the simple grouping by job family already carried out.
Keeping the trace
Each modification deserves to be noted and validated with its reason. This is what ensures consistency over time, when it will be necessary to decide again later, and what thereby makes each decision lasting and defensible before employees, hierarchy and unions.
The essentials
Verifying career ladders is not an administrative task. It is what ensures that an employee, wherever they are in the organisation, can understand where they stand and where they can go, while keeping their engagement. It is a sensitive area: it is seen and challenged by everyone, hierarchy, employees, unions.
It is this work of alignment that the HDH (HR Decision Hub) platform helps organisations to conduct, step by step, by keeping visible the overall logic of the ladders and of the different paths.
This article extends, on a more operational level, an earlier article in this series, “A job architecture cannot be the aggregate of a client portfolio”.