As a compensation professional, you know there’s a lot of terminology to wrap your head around. Sometimes it’s helpful to get a quick refresher on the basics.
Here, we’re breaking down the ins and outs of a few key terms – job levels, job tracks, and job families. We’ll also share how job levels and families set the foundation for compensation benchmarking.
Keep reading to learn more.
What is a job level?
A job level refers to the seniority, experience, and scope of responsibility of a role.
Job levels are often broken down further by:
- Job track: This indicates whether an employee is an individual contributor or a people manager. Larger and more complex businesses may also create more detailed job tracks for different organizational functions, such as sales or customer support.
- Experience level: This is often categorized as a number on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the most junior level and 10 being the most senior.
Job levels typically vary by organization. The degree of job-level granularity depends on a company’s complexity and growth stage. Smaller companies often have broader job level categories, while larger companies may add more layers to their job levels.
For example, Pave data shows that on average, small companies have one to two manager levels, and most large companies have four levels of managers.
Generally, every compensation data or survey provider has four levels for management and six levels for professionals/individual contributors. This is to account for companies of all sizes, but not every company will use every level (again, it depends on the size/stage). For example, here's a snapshot of what those manager and P/IC levels look like in Pave’s job levels:
What is a job family?
A job family refers to a functional group within an organization, such as accounting, sales, marketing, or customer success. The roles within a job family involve similar work and skills.
Within job families, there are job sub-families, which add more specificity to roles.
For example, within the accounting job family, there may be the following sub-families:
- Accounting – generalist
- Accounts payable/receivable
- Controller
- Invoice operations
- Payroll
You can find a complete breakdown of Pave job families and sub-families here.
Much like job levels, job families can vary in complexity and granularity.
For example, at Pave’s Total Rewards Live event, we hosted a panel about the trends in AI and Machine Learning (ML) engineering, and how these roles differ from Software Engineers. We learned that about half of the attendees group AI and ML engineers into the software engineering job family, while the other half have a standalone ML job family.
Many smaller organizations take a more straightforward approach to job families, while larger companies often incorporate additional granularity.
Pave Founder & CEO Matt Schulman recently shared some thoughts on this topic on LinkedIn — see what the community had to say about job grades vs job families.
Why do job levels and job families matter for compensation benchmarking?
These salary ranges impact the entire organization, helping to establish the foundation for fair compensation, control labor costs, and give teams an edge in a competitive labor market.
Once comp leaders have defined their job levels, tracks, and families, they can then start gathering relevant compensation data. We recommend using sources such as:
- Real-time data: You can use Pave’s free benchmarking tool to quickly access compensation benchmarks from over 7,500 companies.
- Offer data: Pave partnered with Greenhouse to bring you real-time offer data, trends, and insights into salary and acceptance rates.
- Compensation surveys: Survey data providers like Aon Radford and Willis Towers Watson provide high-quality job family data.
Aggregating multiple data sources enables you to define more accurate salary ranges and set robust compensation benchmarks.
Comprehensive Data for Compensation Leaders
Job levels and job families work together to help you define organizational roles. And, with clear roles, you can more accurately and effectively create compensation benchmarks.
Check out Pave’s benchmarking tool to access real-time compensation benchmarks from over 7,500 leading companies and 850,000 employee records.
Learn more about Pave’s end-to-end compensation platform
